(Peck, Raoul) Raoul Peck is a Haitian filmmaker of documentary and feature films, and a political activist. Born in Haiti, he and his family fled the Duvalier dictatorship for Kinshasa. In 1986 Peck created the film production company Velvet Film in Germany, which then produced or co-produced all his documentaries, feature films and TV dramas. His feature L’Homme sur les quais (The Man by the Shore) was the first Haitian film to be released in theatres in the United States. It was also selected for competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. His 2000 film Lumumba, about Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the period around the independence of the Belgian Congo in June 1960. A book of screenplays and images from four of Peck’s major features and documentary films, called Stolen Images, was published in 2012 by Seven Stories Press. Among his numerous awards are a Human Rights Watch’s Lifetime Achievement Award and Best Documentary from the Montreal Film Festival. In his documentary I Am Not Your Negro, Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material.
