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HOW RAOUL PECK BECAME A CINEMATIC GRIOT  
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Lovia Gyarkye
March 25, 2026
Hammer & Hope
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_ The Haitian filmmaker has spent 40 years using the archives to
combat historical erasure and to highlight the people’s version of
the past. _

, Daniel Dzonu Clarke for Hammer & Hope

 

There’s a moment in Raoul Peck’s latest documentary _Orwell:
2+2=5_ when a photo of George Orwell as an infant appears on screen.
The black-and-white portrait shows a never-named Indian caretaker
cradling Orwell, then known as Eric Arthur Blair, in her arms. When
Peck first came across the photo, which was taken in 1903, he
recognized it instantly. “Everything behind that image, I knew from
Haiti, from Congo, from any countries of the third world,” the
Haitian director said after an early October 2025 screening of
_Orwell_.

Dozens of people had gathered at the IFC Center in New York City on a
warm fall evening to hear Peck and the documentary filmmaker Alex
Gibney, one of the film’s producers, discuss _Orwell_. The pair’s
jocular banter helped temper the crowd, which seemed slightly on edge.
This film, like many of Peck’s projects, exhumes the past in order
to hold up a mirror to the present. In the case of _Orwell_, viewers
must confront the parallels between our fascist reality and the
English writer’s dystopian visions.

_Orwell_, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to critical
praise, is part biography and part unsettling political appraisal.
Peck organizes the documentary around the last years of Orwell’s
life, when he spent much of his time at a farmhouse on the Scottish
island of Jura writing his final novel, _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. Using
Orwell’s letters, essays, diary entries, and books, Peck constructs
a compelling narrative, read by the actor Damian Lewis, that
illuminates the writer’s personal life, literary concerns, and
political awakenings. A rich selection of archival material — clips
from documentaries and dramas, excerpts from screen adaptations of
_Nineteen Eighty-Four_, and striking graphics — punctuate the film,
adding necessary texture to what could have been a perfunctory
biographical account.

When Gibney approached Peck about making an Orwell documentary, the
Haitian filmmaker was enthusiastic but wary. Peck, whose filmography
includes charged political dramas and experimental documentaries, told
me that he requires an organic entry point into a project. While the
director was familiar with Orwell’s work, he worried he wouldn’t
be able to naturally connect with the writer. But finding the image of
an infant Orwell with his Indian caretaker clarified Orwell’s
position within a colonial order familiar to Peck, who came to
appreciate how the writer’s work revealed a deep understanding of
power and propaganda. “All those concepts that he was able to
develop were not those of an intellectual sitting back in his
office,” Peck said at the IFC event. These were the ideas of someone
who had been born into the colonial system, at one point helped
enforce it (Orwell served as an imperial officer in Burma), and later
campaigned against it. The image became so important to Peck that it
appears twice in the film, once at the beginning and again at the end.

 

Peck had been making films for decades before his breakthrough James
Baldwin documentary _I Am Not Your Negro_ came out in 2017. The
project debuted during a pivotal time in U.S. history and brought him
greater attention, in addition to an Oscar nomination. _I Am Not Your
Negro_ relies on rich archival footage and excerpts from Baldwin’s
unfinished memoir, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson, to sketch a
biographical portrait of the late 20th-century writer and lay bare the
violence still undergirding much of American life. At the time of its
release, former President Barack Obama had just exited office, and
Donald Trump entered it for the first time. Organizers around the
country were trying to make sense of the Black Lives Matter movement,
which was radicalizing a new generation of activists and thinkers.
Peck’s film met the urgency of this moment by finding a throughline
between Baldwin’s writing and present-day politics. Its acclaim
helped build a larger audience for Peck’s work. Both old and new
admirers came to anticipate compelling storytelling, an exciting use
of the archives, and rigorous analysis of contemporary sociopolitics
from the director’s projects.

After the success of _I Am Not Your Negro_, Peck went on to release
the historical drama _The Young Karl Marx_; _Exterminate All the
Brutes_, a capacious if unsteady television series on how colonialism
has shaped the world; the stirring but more conventionally structured
documentary _Silver Dollar Road_, on a Black family’s yearslong
fight to hold on to its land in North Carolina; an engrossing
documentary about one of the first Black South African photographers
to document apartheid, _Ernest Cole: Lost and Found_; and now a smart
portrait of Orwell. All of these works reflect the director’s
uncompromising vision and inquisitive approach to filmmaking. But
calling Peck just a political director minimizes his achievement,
allowing people to ignore the artistic merits and intellectual rigor
of the work. Peck is more like a modern griot, a filmmaker who has
made an art of his archival excavations. He reconstitutes the past in
order to combat historical erasure, and in his films — like the work
of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the literary scholar
Saidiya Hartman — the archives are a contested site, an arena in
which power can be reclaimed.

This has been especially evident in Peck’s recent projects, which
share a similar structure. _I Am Not Your Negro_, _Ernest Cole_, and
_Orwell_ all feature a script — assembled from books, memoirs,
diaries, letters, and the like — that revive the voice of a
historical figure. The text is then reinforced by images, also pulled
from various places within the archive. Peck’s projects are an
exercise in what Hartman has termed critical fabulation, using not
only the archives but their absences and silences to re-present
history. This is most apparent in _Exterminate All the Brutes_, in
which Peck uses archival evidence and fictional vignettes to recast
the history of the Western world as one of greed and destruction,
thereby challenging dominant narratives of morally sanctified winners
and primitive losers. He is committed to accessing versions of the
past that prioritize the people’s struggle.

The day before his event at IFC, Peck reiterated his longstanding
interest in archival possibilities. We were sitting in a conference
room tucked in the corner of the SoHo offices of Neon, the company
that distributed _Orwell_. “I had to deconstruct the existing
archive made by the colonies and find a way to work with it,” Peck,
now 72, said of his methods. “I use video; I use photos; I use
print; I use everything to re-create my own past visually.” He made
clear that he has no problem taking what he needs; to the artist,
history belongs to us all. “I have the right to appropriate myself
the universal culture,” he said.

In many ways, Peck’s work and methodology have never been more
important. The latest chapter of fascist progression in the United
States involves rewriting history. Since January 2025, the Trump
administration has engaged in an alarming revisionism
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removing materials from federal property and land that do not serve a
white supremacist agenda, including, but not limited to,
acknowledgments of slavery in America and the civil rights movements
of Black and LGBT+ people. This is just the first step in rolling back
the progress of these efforts. With their focus on how violent
politics have shaped and instigated some of the most brutal chapters
in world history, Peck’s films offer audiences tools to recognize
and articulate what’s happening and highlight the risks of ignoring
these dangerous shifts.

 

Although he includes autobiographical interventions in some of his
films, Peck is reluctant to talk about himself. He is particularly
allergic to the contemporary impulse to use biography as an excuse or
to position oneself as exceptional in service of careerism, saying,
“Don’t sell me your soul because you want to sell me a product.”

“I use myself to make a point, but it’s not about me,” he told
me when I asked about his early years. “Myself as a person, it is
not interesting.” Others might disagree. Peck was born in
Port-au-Prince in 1953, a few years before François Duvalier began
his brutal reign over Haiti. In 1962, when Peck was 8 years old, his
family relocated to Kinshasa (then known as Léopoldville), the
capital of what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to
join his father. Hébert B. Peck had moved to the central African
country the previous year, after being arrested and accused of
inciting workers to strike in Haiti. The contours of Duvalier’s
corruption had become clear by 1961, when he manipulated the election
to extend his term. The elder statesman who preferred to go by Papa
Doc declared himself president for life in 1964.

In central Africa, Peck found himself “discovering new faces, new
smells,” he said. His family arrived during the height of the
decolonization movement in Africa, a thrilling period in which former
colonized nations broke from imperial powers and achieved
self-governance. Ghana led the sub-Saharan pack, achieving
independence in 1957, followed by Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, and
Nigeria in subsequent years. The Democratic Republic of Congo gained
independence in the summer of 1960. Peck’s father worked for the
United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and UNESCO, while
his mother was a mayoral aide in Kinshasa. They were part of a coterie
of émigrés tasked with helping the young nation develop and occupied
a unique place in Congolese society somewhere between the white
Belgians and the Indigenous population. While living in Kinshasa, Peck
became familiar with the leaders of these revolutionary movements,
from Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré to Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba would
be the subject of two of Peck’s films, the incredible 1991
documentary _Lumumba: Death of a Prophet_ and an eponymous narrative
drama from 2000.

Then Peck’s family was exiled again, leaving Africa for North
America. “There were problems in Congo, so the United Nations
evacuated us,” the director explained matter-of-factly. He spent a
year in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where his Caribbean, Chinese, and Jewish
neighbors made up “sort of a melting pot,” he said. Although Peck
was gaining an informal education through these new environments, the
peripatetic manner of his formal schooling worried his parents. After
his family eventually moved back to Congo, he was sent to boarding
school in France as a young teenager. “That was hard at the
beginning because you want to be with your parents,” he said, but
the rupture made him more independent. In France, he encountered a
more pronounced racism, reflected in clichéd prejudices and calcified
class distinctions. All of this made him, at the time, uninterested in
considering a future there. “I didn’t want to stay in a country
where my place was either already assigned or inexistent,” he said.

After finishing his baccalaureate, Peck studied economics and
engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. It was the ’70s
— the Wall hadn’t fallen, and West Berlin was a hub of
countercultural energy. Peck concentrated his studies on development
and hung out with other diasporic students. “All my friends,” he
said, “were either from a liberation movement or they were in
exile.” These young people dedicated their lives to furthering
collective freedom regardless of personal sacrifice, including
romantic relationships. Peck primarily organized with the Friends of
Cuba and Haitian solidarity organizations that he declined to name. He
said that for members, “the order was no private connection if you
know you’re going to die.” Peck does not speak publicly about the
family he has made as an adult, preferring to leave his private life
as a silence in the archive around which the critic must swerve.

After university, Peck moved back to New York, where he thought he had
a job with the United Nations’ Development Agency lined up. He’d
already interviewed for the role, but then the organization made
budget cuts. Peck became a taxi driver instead. After about eight
months of driving passengers around the city, he decided to commit
himself to cinema. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I could,
like Orwell said, ally politics and art,” he said, “and that was
liberating.” In 1981, after only a year in the city, Peck returned
to Berlin and enrolled in the German Film and Television Academy
Berlin.

Seven years after entering the program, Peck premiered his narrative
feature debut, _Haitian Corner_
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Berlin International Film Festival. The film follows an exiled Haitian
poet living in New York while haunted by memories of his imprisonment
under the Duvalier regime in Port-au-Prince. Obsessed with finding his
torturer, the poet falls into a kind of fugue state, losing his day
job while alienating friends and family. _Haitian Corner_ wrestles
with questions of memory and morality, frequent themes in Peck’s
oeuvre. The film opens with a montage of fictional former political
prisoners, based on real-life interviews conducted by Peck. This and
other docu-realist elements — the verité camerawork and
black-and-white flashback scenes — reflect his interest in
borrowing from different forms in order to create work that better
serves Black life and history.

But it was Peck’s second feature-length film, _Lumumba: Death of a
Prophet_, that fully demonstrated the kind of techniques he would go
on to use in his later works. The documentary combines personal
memoir, investigative reporting, and archival footage to render the
martyred political leader’s history and the challenges of Congolese
independence as a ghost story. Using his family’s relocation to
Kinshasa in the ’60s as an entry point, Peck begins by painting an
inspiring portrait of Lumumba’s crucial role in his people’s
self-determination. He then shows how the charismatic leader’s
untimely and gruesome death (Lumumba’s body was reportedly dissolved
in acid and never found) prematurely ended a burgeoning freedom
movement and turned Lumumba into a restless specter, revealing the
contradictions of the West and haunting the intertwined history of
Belgium and the Congo. Like Peck’s later films, _Death of a Prophet_
features a voice-over narrative, written and read by the filmmaker
himself, that guides viewers through its beats. In it he makes
connections — linking Belgium’s mining avarice and Cold War
paranoia to show how Congolese independence was never taken seriously
in the West — and draws conclusions that would take decades to gain
traction. Peck had originally set out to direct a feature about
Lumumba, but a lack of coherent information compelled him to make a
documentary first. Western history had not memorialized the Congolese
minister fondly. “He was considered some sort of crazy political
leader,” Peck said. “I had to take almost two years to really
discover who he was.”

That hunger for discovery drives all of Peck’s projects, from the
political drama he eventually did make about Lumumba to _The Man by
the Shore_, his heartbreaking 1993 feature about a young girl’s
experience of François Duvalier’s reign. But then, he told me a
month after we first met, “I abandoned cinema with the risk of never
being able to do another film” when Prime Minister Rosny Smarth
nominated him to become Haiti’s minister of culture in 1996. As he
tells it, he had always kept a foot in the country’s political and
cultural conversations, and he saw the role as an opportunity to enact
real change. “I gave my energy to my country, not knowing what’s
going to happen,” Peck told me.

We were sharing a pot of tea in the lobby of the Roxy Hotel,
surrounded by the din of moviegoers, diners, and hotel guests. Peck
was in the middle of Oscar-campaigning season for _Orwell_, which
disappointingly did not even make the documentary shortlist. The job
as minister of culture was exciting — Peck says he enjoyed expanding
Haiti’s public radio and television programming — but it also
meant abandoning his art and surviving on a meager salary by living at
his aunt’s house. “That was a hard time for me,” he said. “And
unless you go into corruption, you don’t have enough money.” After
18 months in the job, Peck resigned from his post, following Smarth,
who left after accusing the government of rigging elections to favor
supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haiti had no
prime minister for the next two years.

In the decades that followed, Peck shifted between documentary and
narrative filmmaking, using lessons he learned from one to enhance his
direction of the other. “He pays great attention to the subject and
really immerses himself, but then at some point, he figures out how to
tell a story with a certain kind of rigor,” Gibney told me recently.
He described Peck’s filmmaking style as that of a “good jazz
band.” The two met a decade ago at an _I Am Not Your Negro_ event
and became friends. Standing more than six feet tall and possessing a
dignified air, the Haitian director “can be an imposing figure,”
Gibney said. “I think people, as a result, don’t think that he’s
got a sense of humor, but he has a very sort of wacky sense of
humor.”

Over the years, the pair bonded over their shared commitments “to
cinema but also to politics or moral inquiries, as I like to call
them,” said Gibney. They also talked about collaborating. When
Gibney got a call from Universal, which had recently acquired the
rights to make a documentary from Orwell’s estate, he thought Peck
would be perfect for the project. The Haitian director’s
cosmopolitan upbringing would allow him to frame Orwell’s story in
an unexpected way, Gibney said: “He would be compelled by the themes
of colonialism, the colonizers versus the colonized, and also the
sense of rich and poor.”

Gibney was right. While there are no explicit autobiographical
elements in _Orwell_, Peck’s personal interventions are all over the
work. The film opens with Lewis reading aloud a quote from Orwell’s
1946 essay “Why I Write
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that echoes the Haitian director’s own approach to filmmaking:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I’m
going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie
that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.”

Peck also sets out to expose and draw attention, creating elegant
inquisitions into the past. The archives are his words, cinema is his
grammar, and politics is the message. When the filmmaker was making
_Sometimes in April_, a narrative film about the Rwandan genocide, he
says he saw himself as a collector of memory and artifacts. Peck chose
to tell the story from the perspective of two Hutu brothers who end up
on opposing sides: Augustin is a military man married to a Tutsi, and
his brother Honoré is an on-air host for Radio Télévision Libre des
Mille Collines, the pro-Hutu propaganda station that helped foment the
genocide. Peck fought for the film to be shot in Rwanda and hired
survivors of the genocide as the cast and crew, encouraging them to
remember their side of the story in a way that felt safe. He also
visited specific sites, from the churches where people were massacred
to the Nyabarongo River, where bodies were dumped. “It’s almost
documenting even though it’s a fiction film,” he said. Peck
prioritized accuracy and authenticity with the hope that young
Rwandans can watch the film 50 years later and see a meaningful
articulation of their history. His approach echoes the theories of
Trouillot, the Haitian academic who argues in his book _Silencing the
Past: Power and the Production of History_ that the production of the
past is never neutral and that “any historical narrative is a
particular bundle of silences.” With _Sometimes in April_, Peck
aimed to reveal how Western countries ignored and dismissed the
violence happening in Rwanda, thereby facilitating 100 days of murder
and erasing history even as it was taking place.

A significant part of shaping previously buried historical narratives
happens in the editing room. Peck’s longtime editor Alexandra
Strauss describes the process like a game of Ping-Pong. She has been
working with Peck since _Fatal Assistance_, the 2013 documentary about
Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, and calls their
partnership a mutual act of discovery. First the production team
gathers a trove of images, and then they begin sifting through them; a
narrative emerges from these early sessions, which helps clarify the
direction of the film. “I get ideas, and then he gets ideas,”
Strauss told me over Zoom. The goal is to maintain a balance between
the visuals — you never want too many photographs or videos or
black-and-white images — to create something that has a rich and
subtle relationship to the scripted text.

Making films with artistic and intellectual integrity for nearly four
decades hasn’t been easy. “Hollywood is not progressive,” Peck
said, although people there “pretend to be.” He has always
produced or co-produced his films through his company Velvet Film,
which he founded in 1986 in Berlin and is now based in Paris. Despite
his unhappy experience of France, Peck moved back after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. “I didn’t like what Berlin was becoming: a city
suddenly colonized by money, bad energy, and politics,” he said.
Still, he considers Paris more of a “fallback place,” a base from
which he can conveniently work and travel between France, Germany, and
the United States. Early in his career, Peck caught on quickly to the
unspoken rules of the filmmaking game. “I realized how I was obliged
to find a way to sell a project to the white establishment,” he
said. Even now, after building an international reputation, he
struggles to get projects greenlighted. He said he and other Black
filmmakers “have to beg and beg and beg, when others have
$200 million to do their movies.” During our meeting in the fall of
2025, Peck spoke at length about how his screenplay about the Haitian
Revolution, which he’d been working on for 25 years, was
“politely” turned down by Apple, which said it had too similar a
project in the pipeline. Peck speculates that it was Ridley Scott’s
derisively reviewed _Napoleon_, starring Joaquin Phoenix. (Apple TV
declined to comment.)

Over the years, Peck has learned not to rely on the industry
— where fortunes change according to trends, panicked financiers,
and the political context — and to be led instead by what moves
him. In the case of _Orwell_, he found, through the photo of Orwell as
a baby in the hands of his caretaker, that he and the English writer
shared a similar language about and attitude toward colonialism. “He
had the same kind of reaction I had, and he knew who the other was,”
Peck told me. Orwell and his family left India for England the year
after his birth. Sent to a series of prestigious boarding schools, a
young Orwell quickly learned about the character of the powerful. “I
lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals questioning nothing,
accepting the law of the stronger,” says Lewis as Orwell in the
film, and “avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to
someone smaller.” After leaving Eton College in 1921, Orwell joined
the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, which only increased his
skepticism and hatred of authority. Those years of service and his
experience of the Spanish Civil War in 1936–37 permanently changed
him. He dedicated his life to political writing and effectively became
an outsider to the colonial establishment he was born into.

Despite the obvious differences between Orwell’s and Peck’s
upbringings, the two do share some similarities. Perhaps the most
striking is how both writer and filmmaker rejected their historically
mandated positions. Orwell was determined not to become a tool of
empire, while Peck refused to remain its subject. Their respective
journeys reveal that while much of one’s life can be determined by
the violent capitalist system and your place within it, understanding
and critiquing its histories have the power to change your
relationship to its present and future. For Peck, this has meant
leaning on archival cinema to uncover new or previously buried
historical threads. “I had to create my place,” he said.
“Creating your place means you don’t put yourself in a position
where you can be hostage or you can be pressured or forced to
compromise.”

_LOVIA GYARKYE is an editor at Hammer & Hope. Her writing has
appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
Dissent, and Aperture. She won an ASME Next Award for Journalists
under 30 in 2024 and teaches in the arts and culture program at the
Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of
New York._

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