Teaser For ‘Ernest Cole: Lost And Found’ With LaKeith Stanfield

EXCLUSIVE: Haitian director Raoul Peck enjoyed a high-profile festival and awards season run with 2016 work I Am Not Your Negro, exploring James Baldwin’s unfinished book on racial injustice in 20th Century America.

After premiering in Toronto, it won multiple awards on the international festival circuit before clinching a Bafta for Best Documentary Film and an Oscar nomination in the same category.

Awards season murmurs are building again around Peck’s upcoming documentary Ernest Cole: Lost And Found ahead of its world premiere as a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival this month.

Deadline can reveal a first teaser clip for the film ahead of the world premiere, featuring a voiceover by The Book Of Clarence Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield. Peck provides the voiceover for the French-language version.

The documentary’s subject South African photographer Cole is credited with being one of the first photographers to expose the horrors of the apartheid system in his native country to the outside world.

His book House of Bondage, which was published in 1967 when he was only 27 years old, led him into life-long exile in New York and Europe, where he never properly found his bearings.

Peck recounts Cole’s wanderings, his turmoil as an artist and anger, on a daily basis, at the silence or complicity of the Western world in the face of the horrors of the Apartheid regime.

The film takes its cue and title from the circumstances around the 2017 discovery of 60,000 negatives of Coles’s work in the safe of a Swedish bank, while showcasing the lost images at the same time.

Ernest Cole: Lost And Found is produced by Peck’s France and U.S.-based production banner Velvet Film. mk2 films are handling international sales.