Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Name: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Genre: Documentary, Biography, History
Released: 2024
Duration: 105 min
Cast: Ernest Cole, LaKeith Stanfield, Jacques Chirac, F.W. de Klerk, Ashley Forbes

Raoul Peck20241h 45mDocumentary, Biography, History

Why we chose it

Sixty thousand photographic negatives sat for forty years in a safe at a Stockholm bank, and no one knows who put them there or who paid to keep them. Raoul Peck’s documentary won an award at Cannes, and the words of Ernest Cole, a freelance photographer from South Africa, still ring just as true.

Synopsis

In 1960s Johannesburg, Ernest Cole is one of the first Black photographers in South Africa to work for himself. He documents the reality of apartheid and smuggles his negatives out of the country, and at twenty-seven he sees a book of his photographs published abroad. South Africa bans it, and when his passport expires, the embassy refuses to renew it. By the time he arrives in New York, he knows there’s nowhere left to go back to.