Screening South Africa, Past and Present

Raoul Peck, ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND (2024, 95 min.)
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a new documentary chronicling the life and work of Ernest Cole, one of the first Black freelance photographers in South Africa, whose earlier pictures were shocking at the time of their first publication, revealed to the world Black life under apartheid. Cole fled South Africa in 1966 and lived in exile in the U.S., where he photographed extensively in New York City, as well as the American South, fascinated by the ways this country could be at times so vastly different and at others eerily similar, to the segregated culture of his homeland. During this period, he published his landmark book of photographs denouncing the apartheid, House of Bondage, which, while banned in South Africa, cemented Cole’s place as one of the great photographers of his time at the age of 27. After his death, more than 60,000 of his 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most of these were forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures Cole shot in the U.S. Telling his own story through his writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation.

Screening South Africa, Past and Present is offered in conjunction with Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition, David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive. Expanding upon the documentary genre in distinct ways, these three films share the common motive of exposing the rippling effects of apartheid in South Africa, from the 1950s to the present day.

Generously sponsored by Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979. Cosponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Whitney Humanities Center