Director Raoul Peck and Eddie Arnold in “Exterminate All the Brutes.”
Photo by Velvet Film/David Koskas/Courtesy HBO
As an activist filmmaker who has been making documentaries for almost two decades and someone who loved “I Am Not Your Negro,” I couldn’t wait to watch Raoul Peck’s four-part docuseries “Exterminate All the Brutes.” Rumor had it that Peck got carte blanche from HBO to bring his vision to the screen, and I was duly intrigued.
The scope of the film is dizzying. It travels through time and space and aspires to distill 600 years of human history. It engages with the work of luminaries such as the Haitian anthropologist and scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot and American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz who wrote the seminal “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” Their oeuvre is indispensable for a clear-sighted, step-by-step unpacking of European colonialism, genocide, and hegemonic epistemological systems. I am less familiar with Swedish author Sven Lindqvist’s work, but “Exterminate All the Brutes” is partly inspired by his book of the same name.