Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck, a native of Haiti, was a man involved in many fields. He was a director, a humanitarian, a political activist, and he was even the Minister of Culture for his home country for a brief time in the late 1990s. Born in Port-au-Prince, his parents took Raoul and his two younger brothers out of Haiti to get out from under the thumb of the Duvalier dictatorship. Living in places like the Congo, the United States and France, he went to several schools before getting a degree in industrial engineering at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He also got invaluable life experience being a taxi driver in New York, and was also a reporter in the mid-1980s before he also got a film degree from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin in '88, right before the Berlin Wall was torn down. Upon graduation, he spent several years making short documentaries before making the leap to full-length films. Peck was the Minister of Culture in Haiti from '96 to '97, resigning for personal reasons. His international breakthrough film was "Lumumba" (2000), a documentary about Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congo in the '60s who was assassinated. Following the sardonic "Profit and Nothing But! Or, Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle" (2001), Peck spent several years working in television in both Europe and Haiti before returning to the big screen with "Meutre A Pacot" (2014), which told the story of a family trying to recover their lives in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. Peck's next film, "I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) told the story of author and activist James Baldwin; it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.