On May 21, Cannes’ Marché du Film hosted a talk titled “Fighting for the Commons in a Time of Critical Destabilisation.” The event saw the participation of director-producer Raoul Peck and Dominic Asmall Willsdon, IDA’s Executive Director. In particular, Peck zoomed in on his Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (showcased in the Special Screenings strand), and on advocacy, capitalism and how doc production has changed over the last 30 years, among other topics.
After a quick round of introductions and a clip from Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, moderator and Head of EURODOC Nora Philippe handed the mic to Willsdon, who admitted how he was very touched by the Peck screening (being a “child of apartheid” himself), and showed some of Ernest Cole’s photographs, referencing a photo exhibition he curated about ten years ago following a series of xenophobic attacks in South Africa.
When asked about why he embarked on making this film, Peck said: “I’m older now, so I’ve to choose my projects carefully. When I start digging into [a given subject] I don’t know where it’ll lead, and I need to keep the stamina. And I ask myself: ‘How many layers can I find in that story? What kind of personal contribution can I give to that story?’”
“In this case I saw the coming of age of a 26-year-old man who is in New York after fleeing South Africa’s apartheid regime. He was thinking of going to the New World, [hoping to find] freedom, ‘milk and honey’ but he ended up encountering something not so different from what he left.”
Peck could relate to Cole’s vicissitudes as he went to study to Berlin at the age of 17. “Back then, Berlin was a real place for most liberation movements. [..] We were organising demonstrations together with German students, and there was a sort of international solidarity, something that has changed over the years. That ‘voyage,’ those struggles were something I was familiar with.”
“I knew I could tell a story of exile, I know what it means to be away from your country, there was a dictatorship until 1986 and even a little bit after that. [..] Your family and friends disappear, and you live everyday with it. Year after Year, Cole realises that the exile is killing him too. You never leave something behind; you carry it on your shoulders.”
“He became homeless and depressed but nobody really wondered why. It’s not just a pathological development. The first reason is exile, and the second is – he phrased [it] brilliantly and in a violently poetic fashion – he didn’t want to be a ‘reporter of misery.’ [..] [He meant that] he was a Black photographer and he didn’t belong to that box. He had a bigger vision. He wanted to be a photographer, period, but there was no space for him.”
Peck refrains from using the word ‘faith’ in relation to societal change and his own vision of life. “I wish I could use the word ‘faith’ but there’s nothing really that gives you hope. I always see [what I do] as something I need to do, I have no choice. You’ve to preserve the past, because no one writes it for you.”
He then touched on his work on deconstructing and reconstructing history, highlighting how picking photos where the subject is looking at the camera are the most interesting. “There you can catch something,” he added.
“You need to find the [right] approach to explore the different layers. There’s still inequality in South Africa, so all [of this film] is very timely. And you can relate to Gaza, Kiev and all these place of war where people are dying. The [right] films and the subject enable to access those thoughts that prompt questions. That’s the reason why I make films.”
Later, moderator Philippe asked to Peck to unpack how his work has changed over the last decades. “It’s a vast question. There’ve been so many changes not just in documentary but in film and photography in general over the last 30 years. It’s changed where you show films. Each person with an iPhone is an ‘artist,’ even though we know it’s not true. But there’s a certain freedom with that, an illusion. These devices also isolate people. I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment of collective fight, collective resistance.”
Next, Peck veered towards an open criticism towards the current capitalistic system. “How many devices do we buy? We can’t even play [all] the data we collected throughout the years. It’s a waste of energy and creativity, which kills the collective experience. […] Young people say: ‘If I’m not happy now, I’ll never be happy.’ Hearing these things makes me worried, prudent and not embracing what we call ‘novelties’ or progress. But what does progress mean? We can send people on Mars, but what’s happening on Earth in the meantime? We’re all in a bus running 500km/h and with no driver, and things don’t happen without people fighting for them.”
Willsdon touched on IDA’s activities, including the organisation’s magazine, its grants (they hand out $500,000 to support doc projects every year) and the different forms of “advocacy response.”
The conversation then focused on the role of film schools. Peck acknowledged how these are “privileged spaces of freedom” and he is not against them in principle. “We get the students that come from that [type of] society, though,” he noted. “I was lucky to attend a politically committed film school in Berlin. I had former taxi drivers, doctors, women who used to be nurses, so it was a very open school. New York University costs a fortune, and there I was probably the first Black full-time professor in the 1990s.”
He added how some of his students ultimately left the school owing to their budget constraints, and went later on becoming “great filmmakers.”
Towards the end of the panel, Peck shared his take on the growing role of the platforms, underscoring how this group of companies is “investing $100-150 billion in film each year.”
“I’m a trained Marxist, so I know it’ll impact the structure. People just think it’s a change [like others in the past] but they’re actually bringing structural changes in terms of contracts, delays, rights, witnesses who need to be paid and come along with lawyers, having final cut [decision] on them. We’re waiting for something to happen, but the ‘train’ has already left.”
Peck added of the current shape of the doc release market: “Documentaries as such don’t exist anymore. There’ll be filmmakers who will continue making their films, spending three, five or six years but the whole system has already changed. On Netflix you can see [generalist] docs – funny stories, crime docs, animal docs – and what we call author-driven documentaries will still exist but won’t be the dominant type of docmaking anymore. [..] Theatres aren’t in business plans anymore. Theatres resisted sound, colour, TV and VHS. For the first time [the likes of] Apple, Amazon and Netflix don’t need it. We can’t imagine it won’t have any consequences, with all that money on the table.”
