‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’ resurrects once-forgotten anti-apartheid photographer

NEW YORK (AP) – When photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at age 49 of pancreatic cancer in a Manhattan hospital, his death went unrecorded.

Cole, one of the essential chroniclers Apartheid-era South Africa, By then he was mostly forgotten and destitute. Banned in his home country following the publication of his pioneering book on photography “House of slavery”, Cole emigrated to the United States in 1966. However, his life in exile steadily was periodic homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times was attached to the list of death notices.

But in Raoul Peck’s latest film, Cole experiences a vivid and moving resurrection “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” told in Cole’s own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which hits theaters on Friday, is crammed with images of Cole, lots of which have never been seen publicly before.

Just like within the Oscar-nominated documentary about James Baldwin “I’m Not Your Negro” Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit along with his hero. The book “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is drawn from Cole’s writings. Through words and images, Peck brings Cole’s tragic story to life, reopening the lens through which Cole viewed injustice and humanity so acutely.

“Film is a political tool for me,” Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. “My job is to succeed in as wide an audience as possible and try to present them something that helps them understand where they’re, what they do and what role they play. It’s about my fight today. “I’m not interested in the past.”

“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is a movie crammed with meanings beyond Cole’s work. It asks questions not only concerning the societies Cole documented, but in addition about how he was treated as an artist, drawing uncomfortable parallels between apartheid and post-Jim Crow America. In the United States, Cole received a Ford Foundation grant to document black life in rural and urban areas, but he had difficulty finding skilled support. Some editors felt that his paintings lacked “expression”.

In 2017, over 60,000 35mm negatives of Cole were discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Much of this material, including hundreds of photos Cole took within the US, is believed to have been lost. It was difficult to search out answers as to how they got there and why they’d not been known about them before. “Lost and Found” depicts the struggle of Cole’s estate to amass the gathering. Only on the eve of the film’s premiere on the Cannes Film Festival in May did the bank finally announce the transfer of a lot of the materials to the estate.

These photos reveal that the artist created rather more than simply indelible images of life under apartheid. Cole’s early photographs, published in 1967, provided the West with one of the illustrative and damning portraits of apartheid, including a widely reproduced photograph of a middle-aged woman sitting on a park bench bearing the words “Unique in Europe.” But he was an equally astute and sensitive observer of segregation and the multicultural joys of American life.

“It’s a matter of survival,” says Stanfield as Cole. “Steal every moment.”

For Peck, the subject material of “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is deeply personal. The 71-year-old filmmaker, former Haitian Minister of Culture, also spent most of his artistic life outside his home country, in Berlin, Paris and New York. He dedicates the film to “those who died in exile.”

“When I say this, I mean most of my friends,” he says. “I recognize all of the steps. When you are taking a contact sheet, I see myself.

Over some forty years, Peck has made a few of his most urgent movies, each fiction (including 2000’s “Lumumba,” concerning the exiled Congolese leader) and nonfiction (including last 12 months’s “The Way of the Silver Dollar”). But he has rarely didn’t employ narrative and documentary elements in movies that tackle their very own shape – movies less fascinated by genre differences than within the seek for unexplored truths.

This makes Peck an increasingly unique figure in a documentary world that’s increasingly dominated by shinier, less insightful movies intended for streaming platforms.

“It’s getting worse. There’s less money, so young people are desperate and accepting things that my generation would never accept,” Peck says. “The whole industry has changed. I knew a different world and I realize it’s not the same one anymore.”

Peck is currently editing a documentary about George Orwell. Like Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, it’ll be told entirely in Orwell’s words. In the times after the US election, Peck worked on an update to a segment of the film that involved President-elect Donald Trump. Peck was amazed by Orwell’s foresight on so many topical issues – disinformation, artificial intelligence, social media and the refugee crisis.

“He was a truly amazing critic of history and the way history is told,” Peck says. “I didn’t realize before I got into it how smart he was about what’s going on today.”

“For me,” he adds, “a film has value if it speaks to us today.”