Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck is a Réalisateur, Scénariste and Producteur of cinema born in 1953 with Port-au-Prince in Haiti. It in particular carried out Lumumba , a film based on the history of Patrice Lumumba and its role in the independence of the Congo.

Course

Its first years under the dictatorship of the Duvalier are remembered by “the disappearance of several days of his/her father and by the memory of his/her mother being involved to draw in the garden”.

In 1961, his/her father, agricultural engineer, choose to move away from the country and fact part of the first quota of Haitian professors recruited for the Congo, in the idea that “French Blacks speaking” would be adapted to replace the Belgian executives which had fled the disaster of a râtée decolonization.

Eighteen months later, in 1963, Raoul Peck joined his father with Léopoldville, with the remainder of his family. His/her parents will remain twenty-eight years there. As for him, it continues its secondary studies with the the United States and in France.

During its studies of engineer and economy at the University of Berlin, it militates on the left and plans to turn over clandestinely to Haiti, like much of another students before him to fight against the dictatorship: “What none us knew at the time, it is that we would have been awaited before even our arrival and we would have been killed, since the CIA denounced systematically with the capacity in place, all “subversive” the potentials”.

Journalism and beginnings with the cinema

He works then as a Journaliste and Photographe of 1980 to 1985, and always carries out several short films Documentaire S in Germany. In 1982, it carries out Of Cuba traigo a cantar , which describes the visit in West Berlin, of the cuban group " Carlos Puebla there los Traditionales" , creator of the famous Ordering song Hasta Siempre , at the time of a great concert for peace.

It enters to the Academy of film and the television of Berlin within which it carries out Leugt , whose subject is the visit of Ronald Reagan in Berlin, which caused violent demonstrations. Then in 1983, it connects with Exzerpt where it carries, starting from a text of Samuel Beckett, a critical and ludic glance on the Grüne Woche , the largest food and agricultural fair German.

Then Merry Christmas Deutschland is a talk on the lessons of the History this Christmas Day 1984 in Germany of Helmut Kohl. Whereas it is still with the DFFB, it turns its first Feature-length film, Haitian Corner . For this film, Raoul Peck turns to New York. He evokes there the difficulty for a man exiled in this city, and tortured in the past by the uncles macoutes, to forget and choose between revenge or forgiveness the day when he believes to recognize his old of torture. He leaves graduate the DFFB in 1988 by writing a scenario with the writer Jean-Claude Charles, “Mission Technical”, never carried out. Contacted then by a producer for a subject on a Swiss doctor in Africa making his “descent into Hell” before turning over “released” to his native land, Raoul Peck makes a counter-proposal and tries first once to launch a project of fiction around Lumumba. Already the question from the point of view of the “black” hero arises, contrary to the usual approach to tell this kind of history through a “European” character, accepted better by the financial ones (example: Steve Biko in Cry freedom ). In front of the obvious difficulties, it decides to carry out in the place documentary creation which will become in 1991 Lumumba, the death of the prophet , on the Congolese leader, father of the independence of Congo ex-Belgian, assassinated in January 1961. It indeed wishes to give again to him a place in the History of the continent. “While working on the scenario, I realized that beyond the documentary biographical one on this character, there was a more intimate history which hid: that of my parents (my mother worked with the town hall of Léopoldville. It was the first to be spoken to me about Lumumba) and the history of the Haitians come to work in Congo”. To tell the “great history through the personal history - or vice versa”. A project complexes from all the points of view. An personal experience, artistic and policy which will determine all other films to come.

Then two years later, return towards a subject more specifically Haitian with the man on the quays , a fiction on the beginnings of the Duvaliérisme and the parabola, installation of the process of terror through the eyes of child a eight year old “on the effect of a dictatorship, a tension on a social body”. The history of “Sarah, a woman who accepts her demons of last and decides to live with them” makes it possible him to be in official competition with the Cannes festival.

In 1994, documentary the Desounen, dialog with death consist of “a voyage on the Haitian territory which testifies to the extraordinary capacity of survival of the Haitians, thanks to the creativity, wisdom, and… the dialog with death. ” Then the same year with Haiti, the silence of the dogs , the realizer documents confrontation between the constitutional president in exile, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and its Prime Minister Robert Malval, remained with the country as a virtual prisoner of the soldiers putchists.

Raoul Peck obtains in 1994 the price Nestor Almendros of the American organization of the human rights “Human Rights Watch” for the man on the quays ; six years later, the same organization will allot to him, the price Irene Diamond , for the whole of its work in favor of the Human rights.

Political experiment

In 1996, whereas he teaches the setting in scene and the writing of scenario at the school of cinema of the University of New York, one asks him to return in the government of the Prime Minister Rosny Smarth, as Ministre for the Culture of Haiti. At one time when the medium of the ambient cinema appears to him more and more far from “its” reality and put in front of the decision to work concretely and collectively with the change in its country, it agrees to temporarily put between bracket its trade of scenario writer and to return to Haiti.

After eighteen months of interdependent fight, the Prime Minister Rosny Smarth refuses the antidemocratic drift of the “good father Aristide” and of his party Lavalas and resigns with five of his ministers, of which Raoul Peck. “With regard to my work of scenario writer, my passage to political responsibilities did not change anything basically, with share very right the profit of a little wisdom. I was rather consolidated in the vision which I had of the capacity and his servants, in my conviction of the refusal of the rules of a faked play, not to accept the structures and ritual done everything supposed being immutable. I certainly as understood as all real change will take time, and that any individual step is dedicated to the long-term failure. The true change is done in the duration and starting from the conscious collective. ”

During the end of his mandate, Raoul Peck works simultaneously on two orders: in documentary the Dear Catherine , ordered by Catherine David, police chief of the Documented of Kassel , it declares “during this time in all that, I try to steal a few rare moments of turning by again exiling me for a few days for other projects, other urgencies… Here and elsewhere in all its nonsense, nonsense to turn a New Yorkean history in an apartment to Paris close to the Bastille. ” It is about Corps plunged , a fiction on the exile and the memory, “the red wire of my films”, that Pierre Chevalier, person in charge of the fiction on Arte, has required of him to realize for several years and who marks the beginning of his collaboration with the producer Jacques Bidou.

Adaptation of the life of Patrice Lumumba

Its experiment of consumed direct policy, experiment which he will report in his book “Mister the Minister… until the end of the patience”, Raoul Peck decides to return to a project which is due to him in heart since years, to approach the character of Lumumba this time by a fiction accessible to the general public.

“The film is not a “adaptation”, it wants to be “true story”. I wanted to extract the cinematographic account from reality while remaining with nearest. I had vis-a-vis me innumerable accounts and testimonys, piles of books and articles, often contradictory or paternalist, always irreconcilable. A kind of immense compilation which would have spoken about me and “the miens” without I recognizing myself there and who obliged me to see the history through the glance of the others.

In work scenaristic, it was often necessary “to reduce” reality, so much it was complex, incredible, insane, and to decode this history written and lived contradictorily by others. I spent to with it time, I sometimes moved back, I wrote more than eight versions of the scenario, until that which was turned, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer. ”

“I would of course have liked to turn to the Congo, at least certain outsides which imported me particularly, but there was the war… The Zimbabwe was selected because it is a calm and quiet country, Switzerland of Africa (one returned from there since)! And with the Mozambique, in Beira, which resembles extraordinarily Léopoldville of the Sixties. A city which did not change since the departure of the Portuguese colonists. ”

Selected with the About fifteen the realizers of Cannes, the film Lumumba profits in addition from an operation of support carried out on ten countries of Africa which makes it possible for the first time to the African owners to present a film of the South in the tread of the European exits then American which devoted film like a critical and commercial success.

Arte: Your money or your life

In 2000, Thierry Garrel, person in charge of documentary on Arte, twice initiates a collection of four shutters, the Stock Exchange and the life where he asks scenario writers “to restore reality in all his complexity to make it possible the greatest number to better include/understand the world in which we live” and in particular to go back to the causes of the social disordered states while inventing writings to not appear in one hour of the data a priori “télévisables”: capacity of the money, markets, universalization. Raoul Peck produces the first shutter, the profit and anything else .

During this period, parallel to its activities of realizer, Raoul Peck is also President of the commission of Aide to the Cinema Southern Funds (April 2000 - April 2002), “what made it possible to have an empirical glance on what was done throughout the world - more than 85 countries concerned - and why at a moment given the contents, the structures, the rate/rhythm even of the scenarios coming from the same area, met, in spite of specificities of the ones and others, to reflect the same faintness, the same anger or the same nihilist despair”

Rwanda: Sometimes in April

Following the success of Lumumba with the the United States, the cabled chain HBO, which bought then diffused the film (first English diffusion doubled on television American), offers to Raoul Peck the project which was going to become later Hotel Rwanda (United Artist, carried out by Terry George). It starts by refusing by thinking sincerely that not only one such genocide was not filmable, but that the idea of a “Schindler' S black List” (as proposed it the request) would not explain of anything, with a public already saturated with prejudices with regard to Africa, political and historical origins of such a catastrophe. Raoul Peck generally poses a certain number of “unacceptable” conditions in the United States: “not to make “an American” film, to have political freehand, to have the director' S cut, to be able to tell the history from the point of view of Rwandan characters, to be able to turn to Rwanda and to finally be able to go to on the spot have an idea before deciding. Against any waiting, Hake Collander, the President of HBO Films accepted all these requests.

Raoul Peck thus goes in 2001 to the Rwanda from where it returns upset and convinced of the need for reacting to this genocide. Without having still an precise idea of what will become Sometimes in April , the realizer, definitely near to the African ground that he considers being “his second fatherland”, immerses himself in the history of Rwanda with the assistance of the journalist Madeleine Mukamabano and tries to include/understand Rwanda of today. He studies multiple reports/ratios, books and documents and collects many testimonys.

The success of Lumumba in Africa (local televisions pass film - illegally - several times per annum) opens all the doors to him and it can even turn to Rwanda, in spite of the initial difficulties (logistic, insurances, human resources). This experiment will allow the year according to other productions turning to Rwanda ( Shooting Dogs , One Sunday with the swimming pool ). “This film made direction for me, only in this country, the history could éthiquement be told only WITH those who were the main actors differently I would have felt a Peeping Tom, a usurper. Then how to even tell an “unrepeatable” history? Which images? Which stories? Any outline appeared too limited, too incomplete, restricted. From where the idea finally to make a choice among true testimonys, to join together them in the same family and to find footbridges dramatic between them over one 10 years period - 1994 to 2004 - and to write a history burst on parallel temporal levels”. Personal histories thus with, behind bottom, the evocation of the international responsibilities, (door) the complicity of France, let it make of the United States, the abandonment of UNO. An ambitious range which makes it possible to approach the problems of the genocide all while not leaving a side reality Rwandan today, ten years only after like their management of justice locally and in front of the international penal court of the United Nations with Arusha.

Within the framework of the moral agreement that Raoul Peck had concluded with the Rwandan ones, they were the first to see film. Exceptional fact also that an American studio allows the first world one of its film on the African territory. Two projections on giant screen at the stage of Kigali were followed by nearly 40.000 people. “One unforgettable moment. One of the rare times where to make a film really direction had. Palpable, visible, carrying an immediate effect”.

Sometimes in April , in competition in Berlin, has had for summer diffused in the USA with great success and even was exceptionally placed at the disposal, free, of national chain PBS for a single diffusion on the whole of the territory, followed by a discussion.

the Business Villemin

Raoul Peck finished in 2006 the assembly of the Business Villemin , first mini-series televised in 6 episodes of France 3 (with ARTE) Co-written with Pascal Bonitzer in which it treats overflows of the media, drifts of justice and polarization of the French company around the assassination of small the Grégory Villemin.

Basing itself on the work “to rough-hew It the innocent ones” of Laurence Lacour, ex-to defer Europe 1, it also worked with the Villemin couple, only people whose private life is approached. “Laurence, a friend of childhood, always held me with the current from time to time of the evolution of her work on her book. But at the time making a film on what I evaluated being a fact various really did not interest me. Twenty years after, the things evolved/moved, so much on the level of my work - I can take different risks - which history of Villemin itself. A history that the recent drifts of Outreau only makes more urgent. A history which gained my interest through the deep pain of Laurence who delivered through her book the bible of this history and with final thanks to my meeting with Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin and their love, their simplicity, their complete absence of rancour, their serenity. (…) As for the surface polemic which started with the advertisement of the project, she recalls us that the wounds were not closed again after twenty years, nor either intentions much less honourable. We, (Pascal Bonitzer and me) we ask only for one thing, beings judged according to the result: the film which we will have made”.

Style of Raoul Peck

Since its origins, the catalog of films of Raoul Peck reflects a whole of films to the particular writing, insofar as the covered subjects are historical so much, policies that personnel. A work which must take account of a burst biography (thus from points of view intellectually and economically conflict) and which structurally exploit so much the effectiveness of the American Cinéma, with its manner, which more complex approaches made of joining, of temporal superposition of the account, Flashforward or backward , as well as a recurring use of a Voice-over, author, character and objective point of view according to the needs for the matter. This approach with the multiple elements, as well formal, structural as esthetic, makes it possible to mix also organically the policy, the history, poetry, the close friend.

From where need for him, by obligation rather than by choice, to be its own scenario writer. The writing for him remains one difficult moment and painful. Nevertheless “it is the only period during which one can live truths moments of jubilation of most sincere, soft rewards of a solitary sacrifice”.

From where also the difficulty to find partners of writing (already difficult exercise in oneself) to the biographical, philosophical or political profile allowing a common or complementary approach: “nothing is more exhausting than to have to constantly explain to a partner of work of the elements already sufficiently évanescents in its own head not to have to try to explain them to another. My meeting with Pascal Bonitzer - thanks to Jacques Make with which it worked with the fémis - enabled me of a blow to as well gain a friend as the solid partner whom I missed”.

Raoul Peck was likely to be able to renew this type of collaboration in the United States, with the writer Russell Banks (on two projects in preparation), him also a particular character in the American landscape, somebody of opened in the world, free of the ethno- and the ambient eurocentrism, and which has - rare for an American citizen - a vision of class of its company.

Lastly, for Raoul Peck, the documentary approach remains similar to that of the fiction (voice-off, fractured structure, mixture of policy, history, memory, poetry). “I do not have an approach basically different from documentary or fiction, if not to try to put as much “possible narration” in my documentary and “reality” in the fictions”. Moreover that it is for Haitian Corner , Lumumba , Sometimes in April or the business Villemin , the recourse to reality, the documents, with the veracious and lived details, is constant. The last three films can even be regarded as true reconstitutions, the didactism in less. “Is not to only try to be exact and precise on reality that one tells, still is necessary it that remains cinema. It is not necessary that at any time the veracity of the matter does not start the magic of the fiction. ”

Catalog of films

like realizer

1983 : Leugt
1984 : Merry Christmas Deutschland
1988 : Haitian Corner
1992: Lumumba: the death of the prophet
1993: the Man on the quays
1994: Haiti - the silence of the dogs
1994: Desounen: Dialog with Death
1997: Dear Catherine
1998: Bodies plunged (TV)
2000: Lumumba
2001 : Profit & Nothing Drank! However Impolite Thoughts one the Class Struggle
2005: Sometimes in April (TV)
2006: the Business Villemin (TV)

as scenario writer

1988 : Haitian Corner
1992: Lumumba: The death of the prophet
1993: the Man on the quays
1998: Bodies plunged (TV)
2000: Lumumba
2005 : Sometimes in April (TV)
2006: the Business Villemin (TV)

as producer and Co-producer

1983 : Leugt
1984 : Merry Christmas Deutschland
1988 : Haitian Corner
1992: Lumumba: the death of the prophet
1993: the Man on the quays
1994: Haiti - the silence of the dogs
1994: Desounen: Dialog with Death
1997: Dear Catherine
1998: Bodies plunged (TV)
2000: Lumumba
2001 : Profit & Nothing Drank! However Impolite Thoughts one the Class Struggle
2005: Sometimes in April (TV)
2006: the Business Villemin (TV)

as assembler

1984 : Merry Christmas Deutschland
1988 : Haïtian Corner
1992: Lumumba: the death of the prophet
2001: Profit & Nothing Drank! However Impolite Thoughts one the Class Struggle

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