You can’t possibly look at Ernest Cole’s haunting photography, capturing the struggle for South Africans during apartheid, and not immediately and urgently think about what Palestinians are living through today. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, the latest documentary from the I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck, pores over those violent images captured by the late photographer in his 1967 book House of Bondage. They show South Africans living with a proverbial boot to their neck – constantly policed, segregated, barred entry to not just spaces but employment opportunities their European oppressors access freely, having their homes bulldozed for new settlements and their marches brutally met with gunfire – viscerally recalling what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Yes, those parallels are clearly in the film,” says Peck, on a Zoom call, adding that it’s those types of connections that inspire him to tell whatever story he pursues. “In this film you can also see the western world not wanting to boycott South Africa while doing business with them: selling arms, buying arms, buying gold, uranium.”
