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 early pictures, 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 considered these 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. Director Raoul Peck joins us to talk about his approach to telling Ernest Cole’s story, including the decision to bring in Lakeith Stanfield to voice Ernest narrative, why he has always shied away from doing “talking heads” documentaries and how Cole’s life experience growing up in apartheid South Africa and then coming to the promised land of America informed his clear-eyed photographs of societies living in delusion and informed by dangerous fairy tales.
For more go to: magpictures.com/ernestcole
2024 Cannes Film Festival – World Premiere, Special Screening
2024 Toronto International Film Festival
About the Subject – Born in 1940 as Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in Eersterust, Pretoria, Ernest Cole began his career sweeping the floors of a photography studio in Johannesburg in the late 1950s. He finally broke through ten years later, when he was hired as a freelance photographer for the famous Black magazine DRUM. His photos made him a target of the South African government and, having become a “persona non grata,” he left Johannesburg for Europe in 1966. He shipped some of his negatives and prints out of the country and left the rest of his work behind, safe in the hands of friends. After a stay in Europe, he settled in New York where he worked for the Magnum agency and published his first book of photographs denouncing apartheid. Entitled House of Bondage (1967), this book was inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Although banned in South Africa, the book was a landmark and earned Cole his status amongst the Black cultural community of the time. Later, Cole received a grant from the Ford Foundation to photograph the lives of Black people in the rural South and Northern cities of the United States. For unknown reasons, the book was never published. By the end of the 1970s he seemed to have abandoned photography and lost control of his archives. He went through periods of homelessness and died of pancreatic cancer in 1990, a few days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Ernest Cole, one of South Africa’s first Black photojournalists, created powerful images that shed light on the lives of Black people under the apartheid regime. These images represent his best-known and most widely distributed work. Anyone familiar with this chapter of South African history will recognize Cole’s iconic photo of a middle-aged white woman sitting on a park bench bearing the warning: “European’s only.”
About the filmmaker – Raoul Peck’s complex oeuvre includes such films as: The Man by the Shore (Competition, Cannes Film Festival 1993); Lumumba (Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival 2000); Sometimes in April (Competition, Berlinale 2005); Moloch Tropical (TIFF 2009, Berlinale 2010) and Murder in Pacot (TIFF 2014, Berlinale 2015). Raoul Peck was a member of the Berlinale jury in 2002 and of the Cannes Festival jury in 2012. In 2001, the Human Rights Watch Association awarded him the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award for his commitment to human rights. In 2017, his documentary on writer James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and won the Audience Award at the Toronto Festival and the Berlinale. In 2018, it won the BAFTA and the Cesar for Best Documentary. This film was co-produced with ARTE. His film, The Young Karl Marx, co-produced with Agat Films, was presented at the Berlinale the same year. Exterminate all the Brutes, is a groundbreaking four-part mini- series, produced for HBO, which tells a counter-narrative to white Euro-centric history and was also co-produced by ARTE. The mini-series won a Peabody Award in 2022. His latest film, Silver Dollar Road, had its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. His company Velvet Film was founded in 1989 and operates in the United States, France and Haiti. All of Peck’s documentaries, feature films and television dramas have been produced or co-produced by Velvet Film. For more go to: velvet-film.com/RaoulPeck
SOCIAL MEDIA
facebook.com/Ernest Cole:/LostandFound
instagram.com/magnoliapics
instagram.com/lakeithstanfield3
instagram.com/raoul_peck
“Peck spends so much time unpacking Cole’s inner life from his diaries and notebooks, because while the photos may live on in archives, those are the stories most at risk of disappearing from the frame.” – Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com
“Peck’s film stands as a requisite biography, but also a personal homage: The response of one politically conscious artist to the call of another.” – Lisa Kennedy, New York Times
“Powerful historical documentary.” – Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews
“Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, yet the place it lands lifts you up. More than a great photographer, Ernest Cole captured something essential. By the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“At the heart of Raoul Peck’s latest documentary “Ernest Cole, Lost And Found,” a stirring lament of the exiled South African photographer, is the devastating image of a life deferred” – Robert Daniels, Screen International
“You’re left feeling that he deserved better, a longer lasting legacy, for he was a pioneer in his field who deserved his flowers while he was alive.”- Chalice Williams, Black Girl Nerds