Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck (born 9 September 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian filmmaker of both documentary and feature films. He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events. Peck was Haiti's Minister of Culture from 1996 to September 1997. His film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017 and won a César Award in France. Peck's HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), received a Peabody Award. Peck is also the founder of Velvet Film, a film production company in Paris, New York, and Port-au-Prince. He also founded "El Dorado Forum" (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) in 1995, a center that supports the creativity and enrichment of artists. Early years and education Peck was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At the age of eight, Peck and his family (he has three brothers including Hébert Peck) fled the Duvalier dictatorship and joined his father in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His father Hebert B. Peck, an agronomist, worked for the United Nations FAO and UNESCO and had taken a job there as professor of agriculture along with many Haitian professionals invited by the government to fill positions recently vacated by Belgians departing after independence. His mother, Giselle, would serve as aide and secretary to mayors of Kinshasa for many years. The family resided in DRC for the next 24 years. Peck attended schools in the DRC (Kinshasa), in the United States (Brooklyn), and in France (Orléans) where he earned a baccalaureate, before studying industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University. Peck always had artistic dreams, but these were frowned upon in Haiti, his home country. He then decided to wait until after completing his studies at Humboldt University to return to Haiti and pursue his cinematic career. He said, "It's what saved me. I didn't come to Europe thinking that I was going to stay. I knew that I had to educate myself as much as possible, then return to Haiti secretly if need be." Peck later spent a year as a New York City taxi driver and worked (1980–85) as a journalist and photographer before earning a film degree (1988) from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in West Berlin.