Raoul Peck on Exterminate All the Brutes

The Film Comment Podcast

For years, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been crafting eloquent correctives to Eurocentric and capitalist histories through acclaimed films like Lumumba (2000), I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and The Young Karl Marx (2017). His latest opus takes that project to its limit: Exterminate All the Brutes is a four-part HBO documentary series that retells the story of our world from a perspective rarely centered in such narratives—that of the colonized. Drawing from three books—Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist, which borrows its title from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; and Silencing the Past by Haitian-American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot—Peck crafts a sweeping historical documentary that feels at once intimate and sweeping, familiar and new. In this episode of the podcast, Film Comment editor Devika Girish chatted at length with Peck about assembling this expansive series, confronting the gaps in colonial archives, and drawing continuities with the contemporary crises of fake news and historical amnesia. Listen to the full conversation and read an excerpt on filmcomment.com. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: - MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment. - Amazon Studios, presenting Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Time. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For your consideration. Learn more at amazonstudiosguilds.com/films.