Everywhere director Raoul Peck looks he sees America under attack from dark, malevolent forces driven by a President Donald Trump dictatorship. Really, he does.
The Haitian filmmaker said as much Monday at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, adding his voice to the swelling chorus of anti-Trump despair coming from the elite gathering basking in the Côte d’Azur sunshine.
Robert de Niro led festival attendees in slamming Trump from day one, sneering at him as “America’s philistine president.”
Now de Niro has company.
Peck, who won an Emmy for I Am Not Your Negro, his portrait of American writer James Baldwin, informed wire service AFP of his fears for America’s future. The New York-based Haitian filmmaker said:
All the signs are there, all the facts are there, where every section of society is attacked. I hope Americans will realise that they are already in an authoritarian regime.
Journalism is attacked. Justice is attacked. The truth is attacked. All the elements that build a democratic society are under attack.
He added George Orwell had warned it would happen in his novels 1984 and Animal Farm and now life imitates art.
“But we still have people saying, ‘Oh, they just came for the neighbour, but I’m fine. And no, it’s not us, it’s Harvard, it’s Columbia’,” referring to the U.S. universities which have come under scrutiny from the White House.
“That’s how dictatorship implements itself in society. It terrorises,” he said.
The AFP interview and report continued, adding Peck said the parallels between how academics are now “under attack” in the United States and the thought police of Orwell’s last book were striking.
Raoul Peck, Damian Lewis at the “Orwell: 2+2=5” Photocall during the 78th Cannes Film Festival held at Palais des Festivals on May 18, 2025 in Cannes, France. (Earl Gibson III/Deadline via Getty Images)
“When you fear to voice your opinion at work, at school, in your everyday life, and God forbid, in public. What do you call that?” he posited.
The Oscar nominated filmmaker, whose body of work centers mostly on extolling the virtues of extreme leftism, was once the Minister of Culture in the Haitian government of Prime Minister Rosny Smarth. He resigned the position in 1997 and since fled violent country where he was born.
This is not the first time Peck has seen fit to attack Trump or his supporters.
As Breitbart News reported, Peck delivered a stream of invective against the president during an interview at the Joburg Film Festival in April, calling Trump and his followers Nazis and insisting the administration is filled with “crazy people” who are putting millions of lives at risk.
“We are in the hands of a bunch of crazy people who have an agenda that was totally written out in Project 2025, the same way that Hitler wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’” the far-left, activist film director said during the interview, according to Variety. “All of it was there to read, and everybody thought he was making a joke. No. They are applying what they said they were going to do.”
Peck then seemed to suggest an overthrowing of the U.S. government, and added, “The question is…what are we going to do. We can’t tweet our way out of this one.”
The full AFP interview with Peck in Cannes can be found here
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