Raoul Peck

We need to learn how to organize, not just to let our anger explode. We need to have organization for the long run, not for one issue, not for one murder, but for everything coming to us in the next 20, 30 years.

We forget that everything has a meaning, everything has an impact on you. It's what we call soft power today. Nothing is innocent.

That's part of being a real citizen: always questioning your leadership, not only about what it is doing in your own country, but what it is doing elsewhere. Because it is connected.

When I started this profession, I wanted to make films that entertain but that have content. When I went to film school, they made me believe that the two could not mix.

You can binge a TV series or watch a reality show, and they're not innocent. They take a lot of room in your brain, and you don't have any space left for your own thoughts. They give you a scripted reality. It's an ideological tool.

I never wanted to be current in the sense that I follow the news, I follow the historical moment of the day. It was always, for me, to go back to the fundamentals.

I came back to Haiti after the earthquake not to shoot a film, but to help and be a part of the rebuilding process, like all my fellow compatriots. I didn't come to shoot a film, but I became frustrated when I realized that my help was kind of useless. We all felt lost and helpless. And it's out of that frustration that I decided to shoot a film.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

My story with film is kind of different because I started with photography because my father was a photo buff. He had all sort of cameras, and I grew up with that.

I have been skeptical, sometimes, about the importance of rap music, which I think is a capitalistic project to make money.

It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation.

Right now, the machine keeps us totally busy. If you don't react against it, you'll end up letting yourself go and become the perfect consumer. That's what they want.