Filmmaker Raoul Peck and author Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss their road to making art that’s political and subversive.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck highlights the roots of violence and inequality today. He is best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary – I Am Not Your Negro about civil rights icon James Baldwin – and racism in the United States, and for his Peabody-winning Exterminate All the Brutes, a sweeping indictment of colonialism and genocide.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and author whose spy novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was recently made into an HBO series. In his fiction and non-fiction books, he investigates his own refugee journey, the politics of memory and the effects of US wars abroad.
In this episode, Peck and Nguyen discuss their political coming of age, what Gaza tells us about the world today, and how they use their work to challenge and unsettle.