Ernest Cole – Lost and Found

More than 60,000 35mm film negatives of the anti-apartheid photographer Ernest Cole were surprisingly found in a bank vault in Stockholm in 2017. Enriched by Cole's own writings, Raoul Peck's documentary tells the story of the forgotten photographer and the people who were closest to him.

Ernest Cole, a South African photographer, was the first to bring the horrors of apartheid to the attention of a worldwide audience. His book ‘House of Bondage’, which he published in 1967 at the age of just 27, led him into exile in New York and Europe for the rest of his life, where he never found his feet. Raoul Peck tells of Cole's life, his inner turmoil as an artist and his daily anger at the silence or complicity of the Western world in the face of the crimes and injustices of the apartheid regime. And about how 60,000 negatives of his works were discovered in the safe of a Swedish bank in 2017. This documentary film in search of the traces of a forgotten anti-apartheid photographer unfolds with the force of an international thriller.