Velvet Film

George Orwell was one of the most visionary authors of the 20th century, whose novels 1984 and Animal Farm foretold a chilling, authoritarian future. Acclaimed director Raoul Peck interweaves clips, readings from Orwell's diary, cinematic references, and modern-day footage to craft not only a portrait of the writer, but a fresh take on how prophetic his work has become.

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.

The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgian overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.

Two brothers are divided by marriage and fate during the 100 horrifying days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

More than 60,000 of Ernest Cole’s 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures he shot in the U.S. Told through Cole’s own writings, the stories of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation and will unravel the mystery of his missing negatives.

Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck takes us on a 2-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti.

26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist’s son, who has been investigating the sordid birth of the British working class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl Marx’s new vision of the world. Together, between censorship and the police’s repression, riots and political upheavals, they will lead the labor movement during its development into a modern era.

Early 1960s Haiti during 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's dictatorship seen through the eyes of a young girl whose family has suffered heavily.

In a fortress on a hill in Haiti a democratically elected president prepares himself for a state ceremony. On the day of the festivities the president finds his country in turmoil. The whole nation is in the grips of a riot that has broken out overnight. But nothing should stop the president’s ceremony.

Documentary about African political leader Patrice Lumumba, who was Prime Minister of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) when he was assassinated in 1961.

The story of the Reels family who are valiantly attempting to protect the land their family bought one generation after slavery. This documentary, based on the 2019 ProPublica article, highlights the covert ways the legal system has been exploited to keep Black land ownership fragile and the racial wealth gap growing.

A road trip, over ten years, across the so-called Amexican border, a mythical boundary, both physical and cultural, that separates the United States of America from the United Mexican States; a journey in search of the multiple stories of those who inhabit it or are passing through: an audacious expedition that aims to paint a colorful fresco where politics, violence, visual poetry and frustrated ambitions cruelly coexist.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, a middle-aged Port-au-Prince couple come face to face with the stark contradictions of Haitian society when they are forced to rent out their villa to a foreign aid worker and his enterprising local girlfriend.