Zitat des Tages von Raoul Peck:
That's part of being a real citizen: always questioning your leadership, not only about what it is doing in your own country, but what it is doing elsewhere. Because it is connected.
I studied economics. I studied industrial engineering. It wasn't until later, when I was around 26, that I really decided to go to film school.
To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.
Sometimes people ask me, 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' It doesn't matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide.
There's an apparent freedom, an apparent liberty of access to everything, but you can't use it because it's too much. Everything is at the same level. You even have fake news. You have to go through fake news to make up your mind. Facts and lies are treated as equal. There are even people who are against the idea of climate change.
If there is something that determines my motivation in the work I do, it's the sense of injustice.
I never wanted to be current in the sense that I follow the news, I follow the historical moment of the day. It was always, for me, to go back to the fundamentals.
You face the reality, whether it's hopeful or hopeless. What's your alternative? To lie down and die?
I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'
We forget that everything has a meaning, everything has an impact on you. It's what we call soft power today. Nothing is innocent.
That's what as an artist you always try to do. To try to be a sharper mind than the average person.
America has been living on the back of the whole world! If you take how much energy we consume, like, 20 percent of the world's energy is consumed in this country. Where do you think it comes from, and what are the sacrifices of those countries?
We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.
I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.
I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.
International aid as a means of development is a major failure, and not just in Haiti.
I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.
As long as you are in that white privilege bubble, you don't need to see the world differently. You don't need to see the world through the eyes of minorities or women.
We need to learn how to organize, not just to let our anger explode. We need to have organization for the long run, not for one issue, not for one murder, but for everything coming to us in the next 20, 30 years.
I have refused money sometimes for a film. I have refused films when I felt that it was not for me. When it was just a job or just about making money, I said no. I wanted to make every film count, and when you are true to yourself, this gives you a certain integrity and a certain reputation.
When I have people trust me with their money, I am obligated to give them a great film. I am not obligated to give them a profit.
Film is carrying a lot of ideology. It's carrying an image. It's forging an image not only of the rest of the world, but also of yourself, you know.
We ignore our own history. We ignore all these values and valuable people who really changed everything, who sacrificed their own lives for a better America.
We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.
