Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024)
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 105 minuten
Alternative title: Ernest Cole, Photographe
Country:
United States
Directed by: Raoul Peck
Stars: Lakeith Stanfield
IMDb score:
7,3 (538)
Releasedate: 20 May 2024
Reviews & comments
mrklm
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- 12367 messages
- 10458 votes
Ernest Cole was 21 years old when he saw Eersterust, the village where he grew up, being demolished by order of the South African government to make way for new housing. For ten years, this freelance photographer worked on the photo book “House Of Bondage” (1967), which gave a striking image of Apartheid. The book was banned in his own country and Ernest Cole lived the rest of his life as an exile. In 2017, the negatives of 60,000 of Ernest Cole’s photos were found to be in a bank vault in Stockholm. What follows is a reconstruction of Ernest Cole’s life based on his photos, archive films and a few minutes of new footage. It is a story that focuses primarily on the psychological effect of displacement that other exiles also struggled with. The photos form a story of their own that is worth watching. Peck begins with a clip featuring Ernest Cole himself, and since Stanfield has a very different voice, he's an odd choice as Cole's stand-in.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Filmkriebel
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- 10204 messages
- 4774 votes
Documentary about Ernest Cole, a photographer who captured the injustice of the Apartheid system in his lens but then had to live in exile in New York. If his many photos had not been rediscovered after a deposit of his assets in a Swedish bank, the man might have been completely forgotten. It would have been a shame, because his photos are beautiful. Especially people ... who are living. Whites, blacks, rich, homeless ... it doesn't matter. Everyone counts. The first part shows what social life was like in South Africa during Apartheid in the early 60s. You can know it from books, but seeing it in photos is something else. The many places where blacks were not welcome, the black nannies who take care of white children who would later hate them, the forced relocations.
Cole then discovers in exile that the situation of blacks in the US is not so different from that in his own country. He arrives at a time of change in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the hippies, the Vietnam War, sexual freedom (photos of interracial couples). Only, "American apartheid" is covered up under an illusion of freedom. Cole himself had a hard life in which he was mainly overcome by homesickness, and because of his status as a displaced person in the US, he often ended up on the streets and without an income. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of barely 50.
Narratively very well told, with often wonderfully spoken texts to accompany the numerous photos. If you are interested in photography, but also in the Apartheid story and the long struggle for equal rights for blacks, then this is not to be missed.
Translated from Dutch · View original
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