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    ‘Lumumba: Death of a Prophet’: Revisiting a Mythic Figure

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    The 1990 documentary about Patrice Lumumba by Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, looks and feels newly minted.“If the prophet dies, so does the future,” the director Raoul Peck says early in “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.” The movie, a personal essay in the form of a history lesson, is as much a poem as it is a documentary.Made in 1990 and showing for a week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a 4K restoration of the original 16-millimeter film, “Death of a Prophet” looks and feels newly minted.Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo, was brought down after a few months in power by internecine rivalry, hysterical anti-Communism and imperialist greed. His fate was sealed in the post-independence ceremonies when he followed the patronizing speech by King Baudouin of Belgium with a blunt j’accuse, citing Belgian racism and “colonial oppression.”A civil war ensued. With Belgian support, the mineral-rich Katanga province was encouraged by Belgian mining interests to secede, and the white-dominated Force Publique, the Belgian colonial army, revolted. Ridiculed and vilified in the Western press, Lumumba — who would be hailed by Malcolm X as “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent” — was killed in early 1961 after being undermined by the United Nations and betrayed by his allies, including his successor, the strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.For Peck, best known for his essayistic James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” made in 2017, Lumumba is a mythic figure. Peck spent his early childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, as Francophones, his Haitian parents had been recruited to bolster the post-independence professional class.As noted by Stephen Holden, who reviewed “Death of a Prophet” in The New York Times when the movie was shown during the 1992 New York Film Festival, Peck “boldly” inserts himself into the film. He not only narrates but often cites his mother’s account of events, puts the exorbitant fee charged by a British newsreel for a few minutes of footage in the context of a Congolese worker’s average salary and explains his last-minute cancellation of plans to film in Zaire, as Congo came to be called under Mobutu.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Colette and Justin’ Review: The Colonized Speak Up

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      In a new documentary, a filmmaker turns his lens on his grandparents during a pivotal moment in the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo.In “Colette and Justin,” directed by Alain Kassanda, the French-Congolese filmmaker uncovers a tangled and pivotal era in Congolese history and the central role his grandfather had in the country’s path toward independence in 1960.The titular protagonists are Kassanda’s grandparents, Colette Mujinga and Justin Kassanda, both born and raised in Zaire, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, under Belgian rule. In the film, which relies heavily on photographs and footage created by the Belgians, Kassanda asks: “How do you make a film from the oppressor’s archives?” And his answer in the film both complicates and deepens our understanding of the way history is documented.Kassanda interweaves interviews with his grandparents and archival footage and images, often superimposing his own thoughts on colonization, migration and family. At one point, they watch clips from colonial propaganda that paints the local people as savages, scantily clad with bows and arrows, acting out tribal disputes with “witch doctors.” But as his grandparents point out, it was the Belgian film crew orchestrating these scenes. This interview technique reveals elements that might not have come up otherwise: the exclusion of women from French education, for instance, and the divisions the Belgian government manufactured between the Baluba and Lulua ethnic groups.Later, when the country achieved independence, Justin joined its nascent government as a senator and participated in a secession movement, leaving Kassanda to reconcile his respect for his grandfather with his admiration for the opposition leader, Patrice Lumumba, who became the country’s first prime minister. The result is a film both intimate and political; informative and profound. It highlights the deep and far-reaching wounds of colonization and offers a balm for its scars.Colette and JustinNot rated. In Lingala and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Ama Ata Aidoo, Groundbreaking Ghanaian Writer, Dies at 81

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      A playwright, novelist and poet, she was a leading African writer who explored the complexities faced by modern women living in the shadow of colonialism.Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She was 81.Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several of Ms. Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.Throughout her literary career, Ms. Aidoo sought to illuminate the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacies of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch.”Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man.In this work and many others, Ms. Aidoo chronicled the fight by African women for recognition and equality, a fight, she contended, that was inextricable from the long shadow of colonialism.“Our Sister Killjoy” was Ms. Aidoo’s debut novel.Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates.As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including stints as a writer in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and as a visiting professor in the Africana studies department at Brown University, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation.“I have always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt some kind of patriotic sense of guilt. Something like, Oh, my dear! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”Whatever her feelings about life abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times recounted how her appearance at a New York University conference for female writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”Although she never rose to hold that title, she had been Ghana’s minister of education, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all. She resigned after 18 months when she realized the many barriers she would have to overcome to achieve that goal.Ms. Aidoo’s novel “Changes: A Love Story” won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa.After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidoo developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the nonprofit sphere, founding the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.She was a major Pan-Africanist voice, arguing for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. She spoke with fury about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.“Since we met you people 500 years ago, now look at us,” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monsters You Made” by the Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum.”“Everything you have is us,” she continued. “I am not saying it. It’s a fact. And in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.”Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Ms. Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.”She said she had felt a literary calling from an early age. “At the age of 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how, I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”Four years later, she won a short story contest. On seeing her story published by the newspaper that sponsored the competition, she said, “I had articulated a dream.” More

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      A Movie Confronts Germany’s Other Genocide

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      “Measures of Men” tells the story of the systematic massacre of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. Its maker hopes the film will bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society.Germany is often praised for its willingness to confront the darkest moments of its history, but in recent years, activists have pointed to a blank spot in the country’s culture of remembrance. Decades before the Holocaust, Germany perpetrated the 20th century’s first genocide: From 1904 to 1908, German colonial officials systematically killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. This atrocity is little known outside academic circles, and there are few memorials or pop cultural depictions of those events.Now, a new movie, “Measures of Men,” aims to change that and bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society. The glossy film, directed by the German filmmaker Lars Kraume, tells the story of the killings through the eyes of a German anthropologist. Aside from playing in movie theaters, where it opened last week, “Measures of Men” had a special screening for lawmakers in Germany’s Parliament, and was the focal point for a series of events at the Humboldt Forum, a central Berlin museum housing ethnological items. Its distributor, Studiocanal, said in a statement that it was planning to show the film in school and educational contexts.“Measures of Men” has also prompted a new discussion in the German media about what many see as Germany’s sluggish attempts to come to terms with its colonial past. In recent years, the country has moved to return numerous artworks acquired during the colonial period, but the process of ratifying a reconciliation agreement between Namibia and Germany has stalled, and thousands of African human remains, transported to Germany from its colonies, remain in institutional collections.In an interview in Berlin, Kraume, 50, explained that his movie was partly inspired by the 1978 NBC mini-series “Holocaust,” an early fictionalized TV depiction of the Shoah, which played a key role in spreading awareness of German guilt after it was broadcast here. “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books,” he said, adding that he hoped his film would be the first of many, much in the way “Holocaust” paved the way for films like “Schindler’s List.”Lars Kraume, who directed “Measures of Men,” said, “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books.”Gordon Welters for The New York Times“Measures of Men,” which was filmed in Berlin and Namibia, focuses on an ambitious German ethnologist (Leonard Scheicher) who develops a fascination with a Herero woman (Girley Jazama) after measuring her cranial features as part of his research. His fixation leads him to travel to German South West Africa (now Namibia), where he witnesses and eventually become complicit in the colonial slaughter.“It’s not just a film about the genocide,” Kraume said, “but also about ethnologists who want to explore foreign cultures, but destroy them.”Many of the scenes were based on real events of the genocide, which took place during a conflict between Germans and Africans known as the Herero and Nama War. After thousands of Herero men, women and children fled into the Omaheke Desert in 1904 to escape the fighting, German troops sealed off its edges and occupied the territory’s water holes, leading many to die of thirst. Lothar von Trotha, the governor of the colony, then issued a proclamation calling for all remaining Herero to be killed.After the Nama joined the fight against the German colonizers, they were also targeted, and colonial officials set up concentration camps, ostensibly to provide labor for German-owned businesses, in which hundreds of prisoners died. The film depicts real facilities in one such camp in which the decapitated heads of Herero and Nama were boiled and cleaned for export to German ethnological institutions. Thousands of skulls of unclear origin remain in German collections to this day.Kraume long wrestled with how to tell the story as a European filmmaker, and said he had decided to depict it from a German perspective for fear that centering it on African protagonists would represent a form of “cultural appropriation.” At one point in the development, he hoped to structure it similarly to Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, such as “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now,” that center their plots on conflicts between “good” and “bad” American soldiers. “But there were actually no good Germans,” Kraume said.Girley Jazama, who plays the movie’s female lead, discovered that her great-grandmother has been born in a German-run concentration camp while researching to play the role.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesJazama, an acclaimed Namibian actress who plays Kezia Kambazembi, the film’s lead female role, learned German to play her part. In preparation for the role, she spoke to relatives about her family’s connection to the genocide and discovered that her great-grandmother had been conceived in a German-run concentration camp. “My ancestors need to be at peace,” she said in an interview. “That’s why I became a part of this story.”Jazama said that, though the film had largely been made to spur discussion in Germany, it had also been a talking point in Namibia, where the events of the genocide had often been passed down via family members. “A lot of people are grateful,” she said, recalling that one audience member had shared appreciation that “now there is a visual representation of what happened, versus just it being told orally.”The reaction in Germany has been more mixed. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the critic Bert Rebhandl wrote that the film focused too much on “German self-understanding” while pushing African perspectives to its edges. A writer in the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that the film depicts too little of the genocide to transmit the scope of the killing and it does not do “justice to the horror.”Henning Melber, a political scientist who has written extensively about German colonialism, said that criticism of the film shouldn’t distract from its potential role in remedying what he described as Germany’s “colonial amnesia.” He said that the film “triggers a debate in a wider German public in a way that none of us academics can achieve.”Kraume emphasized that, although “Measures of Men” was meant to appeal to a mass audience, it was an explicitly “political film,” and that its rollout was partly engineered to spur a discussion. He hoped the screening for lawmakers would drive politicians to work harder at compensating the Herero and Nama, he added.A scene from “Measures of Men.” In 1904, thousands of Herero people fled from German soldiers into the Omaheke Desert, where many died of thirst.Willem Vrey/Studiocanal GmbHAlthough Namibian and German authorities agreed in 2021 on the terms of a reconciliation agreement, including around $1.1 billion in aid that Germany would pay over the next 30 years, the process has since come under fire from groups representing victims’ descendants, who argue that amount is too low, and say they were unfairly left out of the negotiation process. The Namibian government has since backtracked on plans to ratify the agreement, and the German authorities have resisted calls by the Namibians to reopen talks.Kraume said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, should travel to Namibia and officially apologize for the genocide, and that all human remains still held in Germany should be returned. “Europe has done far too little to reconcile with victims,” he said. “I think cinema allows us to awaken emotions, and implant images that can let you see events differently,” he said. “But this is only the beginning of the discussion.” More

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      How ‘Black Panther’ Builds Complex Characters From the Politics of Colonization

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      In the original and in “Wakanda Forever,” heroes and villains are deeply layered, reflecting real-life issues facing people of color around the world.What ingredients make a hero or a villain? Despite so many film franchises’ attempts at bringing nuance to the dichotomy between good and evil, their formulas for these characters, particularly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seem painfully reductive: Heroes make speeches about justice and fight to valiant, soaring theme music. Villains? God complexes and more stylish fashion.A notable exception is the “Black Panther” films, which imbue heroes and villains with a complexity that derives from the politics around colonization and the African diaspora. In these movies, the line between hero and villain isn’t simply one between good and evil; it’s a boundary defined by the relatable ways each side reacts to the real enemy: the white nations and institutions that benefit from the enslavement and disenfranchisement of people of color.“Black Panther” and particularly the new sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” exhibit a reverence for their heroes that’s rooted in familial and cultural legacy. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the king of Wakanda with a superhero alter ego, is grounded in and supported by his lineage: not only do his mother and sister act as his moral foundation, but so do his father and the Black Panthers who have come before him. It’s noteworthy that the ceremony to become the next Black Panther involves being buried and speaking to ancestors for guidance.“Wakanda Forever” begins with the death of T’Challa (from disease, like Boseman, who died from cancer in 2020). The movie honors T’Challa with a gorgeously filmed and choreographed funeral sequence. And it’s clear this is not just about building emotional stakes in the film. “Wakanda Forever” is honoring Boseman himself, showing clips from the first film and allowing the other characters to fully address their grief so that his death doesn’t become just another plot twist or issue that the narrative needs to work around.Shuri (Letitia Wright) in the funeral procession that honors both T’Challa and Chadwick Boseman. Marvel In “Black Panther,” T’Challa’s typically even-keeled, empathetic personality is tempered by his occasionally less than resolute political stances. At first he follows his family’s policy of keeping Wakanda and its resources isolated from the outside world. Then his decision, at the end of the film, to reveal Wakanda’s existence sets off a chain of events that leads to the central conflict in the sequel. Boseman’s, and, thus, T’Challa’s, premature passing begs the question of how the Black Panther would have evolved as king: how would he have ruled Wakanda given his decision to abandon the nation’s isolationist attitude and open it up?The sequel wisely poses that weighty question to Shuri (Letitia Wright), whom the film also entrusts to carry our rage and grief over T’Challa’s death. In order to become the Black Panther, she has to overcome these feelings — symbolized by the appearance of Killmonger, the first film’s antagonist, in a vision brought on when she eats the Heart-Shaped Herb.Her grief is recognizable. In T’Challa’s absence, Wakanda begins to resemble so many Black communities in which the women are left to mourn and then take charge after the men die, the victims of poor health or violence. Of course Shuri feels wronged and spends the film being warned against her rage — “Wakanda Forever” is well aware of the enduring angry Black woman stereotype and surmounts it by having Shuri harness and work through her anger, ultimately evolving to become the hero in the end.On the flip side, the villains of the “Black Panther” films aren’t clear-cut enemies but victims of structural racism: Killmonger in the original and Namor in the sequel are righteously angry men of color who are responding to the ways their communities have been damaged by several great -isms (including capitalism, colonialism and, again, racism). Killmonger, who grew up in Oakland without a father and with all the disadvantages that come with being a Black man in America, wants to use Wakandan technology to empower Black people all over the world. His plan is violent, but it’s not far from the Black Power movement’s extreme factions in the 1960s. (That’s when a group of Black Panthers with guns protested at the California Statehouse, proclaiming, “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves.”)Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor, king of the hidden underwater civilization Talokan. MarvelNamor, the king of Talokan, a hidden Atlantis-style underwater civilization of Indigenous peoples, is a direct victim of colonization who has witnessed the enslavement of his people. He fears that Talokan might be discovered now that America and its allies are searching for vibranium. Will his people be at risk of exploitation and violence from white nations as a consequence of T’Challa’s decision to reveal Wakanda and its resources?On one level the conflicts in these movies are insular: communities of color are set against one another, which is so much more real than an evil robot or a big purple dude snapping half the universe away. But in “Wakanda Forever,” although the big battle is between Wakanda and Talokan, the actual villains are the countries searching for vibranium in their bids for power. In an early scene at the United Nations, Queen Ramonda confronts diplomats demanding access to vibranium; their countries have sent undercover agents to raid Wakanda’s vibranium facilities, and have searched the ocean for other possible stores of vibranium, aiming to use the precious metal to further develop their weaponry.In “Black Panther,” the film tosses us a red herring in the form of Ulysses Klaue, one of Black Panther’s main nemeses and the son of an actual Nazi in the original comics. Klaue is perfectly set up as the bad guy: he’s a criminal mastermind, a shady profiteer who sells weapons and artifacts, many from Wakanda. A more predictable film would have maintained him as the big bad guy and brought Killmonger in as a villainous sidekick — a Black man misled by anger, but still likely to redeem himself by the end. With his murder of Klaue, Killmonger may have supplanted him as the antagonist, but the reality is that the fountainhead for Killmonger’s fury and militant politics are society’s racial inequities, exploited by Klaue, Europeans and others who see Black people primarily as a means to building wealth, tracing all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.When Shuri is forced to confront Killmonger, which means confronting the part of her that’s angry and hurt and hardened by grief, the film implies that this is a common duality Black people embody today, that we must simultaneously hold our personal sense of dignity and righteousness, like a Wakandan royal, and our outrage and shame, like Killmonger. Does that make any one of us less than a hero? No, these films say, because in the end there’s still a Black Panther protecting the nation.In these films, the true villain is a history of white oppression and power, but the enemy — whether another person of color or a Black person elsewhere in the diaspora — is on the same team. More

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      ‘Cane Fire’ Review: Here Am I, Your Plundered Island

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      Burning resentment at colonial exploitation on Kauai, seen through the veil of history’s smoke.The documentary “Cane Fire” begins with a reference to a lost silent film of the same name, made by the director Lois Weber in 1934. Her pre-Hays-Code melodrama followed a doomed romance between a plantation owner and one of his workers, and ended with its spurned heroine burning the fields of her former lover. In the new documentary, the director, Anthony Banua-Simon, explains in voice-over that the original film was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and that his great-grandfather was one of the Filipino plantation workers hired as an extra.In the spirit of this opening acknowledgment, Banua-Simon’s version of “Cane Fire” uses his own family history to demonstrate Kauai’s legacy of plantation colonialism. Woven into this record, archival footage shows how Hollywood beckoned to tourists with its romantic vision of Bali Hai — a paradise where visitors are kings and locals are set dressing.Banua-Simon interviews relatives who still live in Kauai, along with their neighbors and co-workers. Through these conversations, he chronicles exploitation that spans generations. In the film, locals explain that while sugar plantation workers once organized unions, their descendants now break their backs to fuel Kauai’s tourist and real estate industries.The cinematography is often grainy, and occasionally Banua-Simon’s choice of interview subjects feels unfocused or repetitive. But there is tremendous educational and moral value in his overview of the history of Kauai. He has a strong grasp of how industries mutate, replicating their practices of exploitation like a cancer. The context he provides in voice-over and through archival footage lends power to his interviews, suggesting the generations of exhaustion that underlie simple statements of frustration and grief.Cane FireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In ‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ Raoul Peck Takes Aim at White Supremacy

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      After completing his 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” the director Raoul Peck felt he’d had his say on the topic of U.S. race relations. Or at least his subject, the writer James Baldwin, had.In the film, Baldwin called whiteness a “metaphor for power” and called out this country’s legacy of racism in the bluntest of terms. What more could Peck say that Baldwin hadn’t?“Baldwin is one of the most precise scholars of American society,” Peck said in a video interview from his home in Paris. “If you didn’t understand the message, that means there is no hope for you.”The film went on to win over a dozen film awards and an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. In addition to the accolades and rave reviews, “I Am Not Your Negro” prompted a revival of interest in Baldwin’s work that continues today. In the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the writer’s work seems as relevant as ever. Even so, said Peck: “I was astonished that people could continue to live their lives as if nothing had happened. As if these words didn’t exist.”The realization prompted Peck to try to uncover the roots of what Baldwin had written and spoken about so eloquently and passionately: the history of racism, violence and hate in the West. “What was the origin story of all of this?” Peck said he wondered. “Where did the whole ideology of white supremacy begin?”That search is the focus of Peck’s latest project, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a supremely ambitious, deeply essayistic undertaking that combines archival footage, clips from Hollywood movies, scripted scenes and animated sequences. Premiering Wednesday on HBO Max, the four-part series charts the history of Western racism, colonialism and genocide, from the Spanish Inquisition and Columbus’s “discovery” of already populated lands, through the stories of the Atlantic slave trade, the massacre at Wounded Knee and the Holocaust.In scripted recreations, Caisa Ankarsparre plays a recurring role representing Indigenous at various times and places in history.David Koskas,/Velvet Film, via HBOFor Peck, who weaves his own story into the film using voice-over, snapshots and home movies, the project is an intensely personal one. In many ways, he is the ideal person to narrate a tale about western colonialism: After growing up in Haiti, a former colony that won its independence in 1804, he moved at age 8 with his family to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where his parents worked for the newly liberated government. He has also lived and worked in New York, West Berlin and Paris, and has directed films about the Haitian revolution (“Moloch Tropical”) and the assassinated Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba (“Lumumba: Death of a Prophet”).“I think my soul is somehow Haitian,” he said, “but I’ve been influenced by all the places I’ve been.”Peck began thinking about “Exterminate” in 2017 after Richard Plepler, then the chairman of HBO, “cursed” him “for 10 minutes” for not bringing “I Am Not Your Negro” to his network, then offered him carte blanche for his next project.“We’d been working on several film ideas, both documentary and feature film,” said Rémi Grellety, Peck’s producer for the past 13 years. “And Raoul said, ‘Let’s bring Richard the toughest idea.’”A photograph of Long Feather, left, and Father Craft by David Francis Barry from the 1880s, as seen in “Exterminate All the Brutes.”Denver Public Library, via HBOThe film, they told Plepler in a two-page pitch, would be based on the historian Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a mix of history and travelogue that used Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness” as a jumping off point to trace Europe’s racist past in Africa. (“Exterminate all the brutes” are the final words we hear from Kurtz, Conrad’s ivory trading “demigod.”) It would be about that, but also much more, much of which they hadn’t quite worked out yet.“There were a lot of ideas in that pitch,” Grellety remembered.After mining Lindqvist’s book, Peck determined he needed a similar text about the history of genocide in the United States. He came upon “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning examination of this country’s centuries-long war against its original inhabitants, and was “wowed.” Peck and Dunbar-Ortiz talked at length about her book and his film, and how the two might come together.Many of the film’s most powerful scenes derive from Dunbar-Ortiz’s text, including an animated sequence depicting Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of Choctaws crossing the Mississippi in 1831, on what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. When their dogs realize they are being left behind, they “set up a dismal howl,” leaping into the icy waters of the Mississippi in a vain attempt to follow.“I’m almost crying now, just thinking about it,” Dunbar-Ortiz said. “And in the film, showing it in animation, I think it’ll make a lot of people cry.”To round out the history, Peck turned to the work of his friend, the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who died in 2012. Peck was moved by a central idea in Trouillot’s book “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History”: that “history is the fruit of power,” shaped and told (or not) by the winners.“That’s the history of Europe,” Peck said. “Europe got to tell the story for the last 600 years.”Peck with Eddie Arnold, who plays an Anglican cleric in one of several dramatizations that use anachronism and self-reflexiveness to challenge historical conventions. David Koskas/Velvet Film, via HBOThroughout the series, Peck takes down a succession of sacred cows, including the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (“a murderer”); Winston Churchill, who as a young war correspondent described the slaughter of thousands of Muslim troops at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman as “a splendid game”; and even “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” author, L. Frank Baum, who advocated the extermination of Native Americans after the massacre at Wounded Knee.Among his most frequent targets is Donald Trump, which the film compares — through a series of powerful juxtapositions — to bigots throughout history. “I am an immigrant from a shithole country,” Peck says at one point, one of several references in the series to Trump’s racist rhetoric.As a way of creating a “new vehicle to make you feel what the real world is,” Peck said, he filmed several scenes starring Josh Hartnett as a 19th-century U.S. Army officer (loosely based on Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney Jesup), a racist Everyman who reappears throughout history, hanging Black people and shooting Native Americans. Hartnett met Peck years ago on a failed film project, and then later at Cannes, and the two had become friends.“Last year, he called me and said he wanted a white American actor to play the tip of the genocidal sword of Western history, and he had thought of me,” Hartnett said. “I thought, wow, that’s flattering.”“I’ve known him for 20 years,” Peck said, “and so I knew I could have that conversation with him.”In March of last year, Hartnett and the rest of the cast and crew traveled to the Dominican Republic to film the live-action scenes, with locations around the island nation standing in for Florida and the Belgian Congo. Then the pandemic hit, shutting down operations the night before production was due to start. Peck considered his options and moved the entire shoot closer to home.“We were in the South of France in the summertime,” Hartnett said. “So it wasn’t a bad situation.”Through meta-textual moments and manipulations, Peck creates his own counterbalance to the dominant Western version of history, forcing viewers to think about the narratives, both popular and academic, they’ve been fed all their lives. In one scene, Hartnett’s character shoots an Indigenous woman (Caisa Ankarsparre), only to have it revealed that she is an actress on a film shoot. In another, a 19th century Anglican cleric gives a lecture dividing humanity into the “savage races” (Africans), the “semicivilized” (Chinese), and the “civilized” — to a contemporary audience filled with people of color.“I think my soul is somehow Haitian,” said Peck, who was born in Haiti but has lived all over the world, including his current home, Paris. “But I’ve been influenced by all the places I’ve been.”Matthew Avignone for The New York TimesEarly in the series, Peck declares, “There is no such thing as alternative facts.” But he also seems to recognize the selective nature of all historical narrative and the power of controlling the image, probing deeper truths in some scenes by asking viewers to imagine what history might be like if things had gone a different way. In one scene, white families are shackled, whipped and marched through the jungle. In another, Columbus’s landing party is slaughtered on the beaches of present-day Haiti in 1492.“I’m going to use every means necessary to convey these points,” Peck said.A longtime filmmaker and film lover, Peck filled his series with movie clips to illustrate Hollywood’s creative reshaping of history (John Wayne in 1960s “The Alamo”) and as a supplement to his arguments. (In a scene played for laughs, Harrison Ford shoots a scimitar-wielding Arab in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”)One of the most disturbing clips in the series — no small feat — is from an otherwise lighthearted Hollywood musical: “On the Town” (1949). In the scene, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller and others cavort through a seemingly docent-free natural history museum, chanting in mock African gibberish, dressing as Indigenous Americans and letting out “war whoops,” and mugging as South Pacific “natives.” Set to the tune “Prehistoric Man,” the dance number conflates a club-toting cave man — “a happy ape with no English drape” — with Native Americans, Africans and Pacific Islanders.“When I watched it, I said, ‘No, my God, that’s not possible,’” Peck said. “It’s like they knew I was making this film. It just kept giving and giving.”Not surprisingly, getting rights to some of the clips was a struggle. “We didn’t lie,” Grellety said. “We were contacting people and saying, the title is ‘Exterminate All the Brutes.’ So they knew it wasn’t a romantic comedy.” In some cases, the filmmakers had to secure the clips by invoking fair use — as they did with “Prehistoric Man.”Peck might not have seen himself reflected in the movies he grew up watching as a young boy in Haiti, but he uses those Hollywood clips to help tell the history of the West anew. This process of imaginative recovery was no accident.“I was born in a world where I didn’t create everything before me,” he said. “But I can make sure that I take advantage of everything I can to show that the world as you think it is, is not the world as it is.“And those Hollywood films, those archive folders, those are windows that they didn’t know that they left open.” More