Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

With his harrowing images, photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was the first to show what apartheid meant for black South Africans like himself in the late 1960s. The world was shocked. Cole was praised for his talent, brought together in his book House of Bondage. But showing the harsh reality came at a price: Cole was banished to New York. The fact that he increasingly saw similarities in the US with the racism in his own country was a hard lesson. Cole fell into oblivion in the 1980s, partly because his negatives seemed to have been lost. He died there in poverty in 1990, without ever returning to his home country. That seemed to be the end of his turbulent story. Until 60,000 negatives of his work were discovered in a Swedish bank vault in 2017. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a confrontational documentary and an endearing tribute to the photographer whose work is still relevant today. Using his stunning photographs, director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) tells of his wanderings, his restlessness as an artist and his daily anger at the complicity of the Western world in the horrors of the apartheid regime. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found made a triumphant tour of many film festivals and was awarded the L’Oeil d’or for best documentary in Cannes.