Director Raoul Peck

Episode notes

Photo Credit: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)

Director Raoul Peck on his life and filmmaking

Raoul Peck makes sweeping, breathtaking, insightful films that marry the political to the personal.

He was born in Port-au-Prince, the son of an agronomist and an aide both working in the political realm. As a young boy his family fled the Duvalier dictatorship and joined his father in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As a director, he’s made both documentaries and feature films. That includes 2000’s Lumumba about the assassinated Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, 2016’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro which vividly reworked the writings of the late James Baldwin and 2017’s The Young Karl Marx—a biopic about the German philosopher’s young adulthood.

His latest project is Exterminate All the Brutes, an HBO docuseries. Based on the book by Sven Lindqvist, the film delves into the destruction and desolation caused by European colonialism in places like Australia, Africa, Asia and the Americas.

We revisit our 2018 conversation with Raoul Peck to discuss the difficulty of telling complex political stories, he’ll share his experience as a young boy surviving a dictatorship and why knowledge is the enemy of terror. Plus, he’ll share with us how his father’s story impacted his filmmaking.

This interview originally aired in 2018.

In this episode...

Jesse Thorn

Host

Kevin Ferguson

Senior Producer

Jesus Ambrosio

Producer

Richard Robey

Maximum Fun Producer

Daniel Huecias

Maximum Fun Production Fellow

Daniel Arón Speer

Video Editor

Guests

Raoul Peck

About the show

Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.

Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.

If you would like to pitch a guest for Bullseye, please CLICK HERE. You can also follow Bullseye on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. For more about Bullseye and to see a list of stations that carry it, please click here.