Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

2024 • 106 minutes

About this movie

Visionary filmmaker Raoul Peck chronicles the life and work of Ernest Cole, one of the first Black freelance photographers in South Africa, whose early pictures revealed to the world Black life under apartheid. When Cole fled South Africa in 1966, he lived in exile in the U.S., extensively photographing New York City and the American South, fascinated by the ways the country could be at times vastly different, and at others eerily similar, to his segregated homeland. After his death, more than 60,000 of his 35mm film negatives were rediscovered. Through Cole’s own writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, Peck reintroduces Ernest Cole as a pivotal artist to a new generation. With Lakeith Stanfield as the voice of Cole.