by J. Oliver Conroy
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The Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck has devoted his career to investigating the pathologies of the 20th and 21st century and forcing audiences to confront them. His brooding documentaries and feature films have explored economic despair in Haiti, the legacy of Papa Doc Duvalier’s brutal dictatorship there, the Rwandan genocide, the assassinated Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, and Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels’s creation of the
Communist Manifesto. Like the left-wing English filmmaker Ken Loach, known for his naturalistic and bleak dramatizations of the Irish revolution, British poverty, and the Spanish civil war, Peck is drawn to projects about injustice, rendered in unflinching and sometimes disturbing detail. It seems safe to guess that he was not on the short list to direct