Raoul Peck

“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.”

“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.”

“When you stand up in the morning, you look in the mirror and say, 'I'm black.' No. You wake up and you see yourself as a human being in the world, but you raise discussion and raise aggression, the anger that you confront every day of your life, whether you want to or not.”

“That's the absurdity of Twitter. You can react without thinking now.”

“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.”

“I studied economics. I studied industrial engineering. It wasn't until later, when I was around 26, that I really decided to go to film school.”

“Sometimes people ask me, 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' It doesn't matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide.”

“I have to make sure, when you start seeing a film, you are going to see it until the end. I have to, of course, entertain you a little bit. The real question is how far do I go?”

“As long as you are in that white privilege bubble, you don't need to see the world differently. You don't need to see the world through the eyes of minorities or women.”

“I refuse to make films where the audience comes for consumption. I make films where you know you are also part of the process.”

“Film is carrying a lot of ideology. It's carrying an image. It's forging an image not only of the rest of the world, but also of yourself, you know.”

“I remember a time when you were protesting on the street together with your professors, with your union, with your school organizations. Everybody was in the streets. Now, everybody is kept alone in his box, in this fragile condition, afraid of losing tenure.”

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

“If there is something that determines my motivation in the work I do, it's the sense of injustice.”

“When I have people trust me with their money, I am obligated to give them a great film. I am not obligated to give them a profit.”

“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.”

“If you asked me today if there's a piece that I would do differently - there's nothing. Regret happens with all my films.”

“When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.”

“Even in Haiti, I saw John Wayne movies. American cinema has always been the dominant cinema throughout the world, and people tend to forget that. People aren't just seeing these films in California or Florida. They're seeing them in Haiti, in Congo, in France, in Italy and in Asia. That is the power of Hollywood.”

“Only if you were lucky to be born in the right class, the one Donald Trump was born in, then of course you have a beautiful view of the world. You find that everybody else is an imbecile, because he doesn't think like you, he doesn't dress like you, he doesn't have the same girl as you, etc. But I call that ignorance.”