'Ernest Cole: Lost and Found' resurrects a once-forgotten anti-apartheid photographer

NEW YORK (AP) — When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.

Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book “House of Bondage,” Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.

But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck’s new film “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” narrated in Cole’s own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole’s photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.

As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is drawn from Cole’s own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.

“Film is a political tool for me,” Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. “My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It’s about my fight today. I don’t care about the past.”

“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole’s work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist, drawing uncomfortable parallels between apartheid and post-Jim Crow America. In the U.S., Cole was given a Ford Foundation grant to capture Black life in rural and urban areas, but he struggled to find a foothold professionally. Some editors said his images lacked “edge.”

In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s 35mm film negatives were discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Much of that material, including thousands of photographs Cole took in the U.S., was believed lost. Answers for how they had gotten there, and why they hadn't been known about earlier were hard to come by. “Lost and Found” portrays the struggle of Cole's estate to acquire the collection. Only on the eve of the film's Cannes Film Festival premiere in May did the bank finally announce the handover of most materials to the estate.

What those photographs reveal is an artist who made much more than indelible images of apartheid life. Cole’s early photographs, published in 1967, offered one of the most illustrative and damning portraits of apartheid to Western eyes, including a widely reproduced photograph of a middle-aged woman sitting on a park bench that read “European’s only.” But he was an equally astute and sensitive observer of the segregations, and multicultural joys, of American life.

“It’s a matter of survival,” Stanfield narrates as Cole. “Steal every moment.”

For Peck, the themes of “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” are deeply personal. The 71-year-old filmmaker, a former minister of culture in Haiti, has spent much of his artistic life also away from his native country, in Berlin, Paris and New York. He dedicates the movie “to those who died in exile.”

“When I say that, that’s most of my friends,” he says. “I recognize all the steps. When you take a contact sheet, I see myself.”

For some four decades, Peck has made some of the most urgent films, in both fiction (including 2000’s “Lumumba,” about the exiled Congo leader) and non-fiction (including last year’s “Silver Dollar Road” ). But he has rarely not employed both narrative and documentary elements in films that take their own shape — movies less interested in genre distinctions than they are pursuing unexamined truths.

That’s made Peck an increasingly exceptional figure in a documentary world that’s become more and more dominated by glossier, less probing films for streaming platforms.

“It’s gotten worse. There’s less money so young people are desperate and accept stuff that my generation would never accept,” Peck says. “The whole industry has changed. I knew another world, and I recognize it’s not that anymore.”

Peck is currently editing a documentary on George Orwell. Like “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” it will be told totally in Orwell’s words. A few days after the U.S. election, Peck was working to update a moment in the film that touches on President-elect Donald Trump. Peck has been astonished at how prescient Orwell was on so many current issues — misinformation, AI, social media, the refugee crisis.

“He was a really incredible critic of history and how history is even told,” says Peck. “Before plunging into it, I did not realize how sharp he was about what’s going on today.”

“To me,” he adds, “a film has value if it’s talking to us today.”

This image released by Magnolia pictures shows a photo taken by Ernest Cole from the film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found." (Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures via AP)

This image released by Magnolia pictures shows a photo taken by Ernest Cole from the film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found." (Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures via AP)

This image released by Magnolia pictures shows a photo taken by Ernest Cole from the film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found." (Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures via AP)

FILE - Director Raoul Peck poses for a portrait during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2023. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File)

This image released by Magnolia pictures shows a photo of Ernest Cole from the film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found." (Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures via AP)

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction on charges that he staged a racist and homophobic attack against himself in downtown Chicago in 2019 and lied to police.

The state's highest court ruled that a special prosecutor should not have been allowed to intervene after the Cook County state’s attorney initially dropped charges against Smollett in exchange for forfeiting his $10,000 bond and conducting community service. The ruling and the appeal did not address Smollett's continued claim of innocence.

Smollett, who is Black and gay, claimed two men assaulted him, spouted racial and homophobic slurs and tossed a noose around his neck, leading to a massive search for suspects by Chicago police detectives and kicking up an international uproar. Smollett was on the television drama “Empire,” which filmed in Chicago, and prosecutors alleged he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to hate mail he received.

“We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust,” Justice Elizabeth Rochford wrote in the court's 5-0 decision. “Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the state was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied.”

Smollett’s attorneys have argued that the case was over when Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx's office dropped an initial 16 counts of disorderly conduct. The deal prompted immediate backlash, with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel calling it “a whitewash of justice.” A special prosecutor was appointed, and a grand jury restored charges, leading to Smollett's conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021.

“This was not a prosecution based on facts, rather it was a vindictive persecution and such a proceeding has no place in our criminal justice system," Smollett's attorney, Nenye Uche, said in a statement. Uche said “rule of law was the big winner today” and thanked the court for "restoring order to Illinois’ criminal law jurisprudence.”

The special prosecutor, Dan Webb, said he disagreed with the court's ruling while noting that it “has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence.”

"The Illinois Supreme Court did not find any error with the overwhelming evidence presented at trial that Mr. Smollett orchestrated a fake hate crime and reported it to the Chicago Police Department as a real hate crime, or the jury’s unanimous verdict that Mr. Smollett was guilty of five counts of felony disorderly conduct," Webb said.

A message seeking comment was sent Thursday to Foxx's office.

Testimony at trial indicated Smollett paid $3,500 to two men whom he knew from “Empire” to carry out the attack. Prosecutors said he told them what slurs to shout, and to yell that Smollett was in “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to the Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan.

Smollett testified that “there was no hoax” and that he was the victim of a hate crime in his downtown Chicago neighborhood.

He was sentenced to 150 days in jail — six of which he served before he was freed pending appeal — and was ordered to pay about $130,000 in restitution. Webb noted that Chicago officials can still pursue their civil case against Smollett that seeks to recoup the $130,000, the amount police say they paid in overtime to pursue Smollett's accusations.

Smollett, a child actor who appeared in 1992 movie “The Mighty Ducks,” has credited his role as a singer on the hip-hop drama “Empire” for turbocharging his career. This year, he starred in the movie “The Lost Holliday” with Vivica A. Fox.

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis and Justice Joy Cunningham took no part in Thursday’s decision.

Tareen reported from Chicago.

FILE - Jussie Smollett arrives at the BET Awards, June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)