Ernest Cole, a South African photographer, was the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to the world. His book House of Bondage, published in 1967 when he was only 27, led him to exile in New York and Europe for the rest of his life, never finding a true sense of belonging again.

Raoul Peck tells the story of Cole’s wandering, his struggles as an artist, and his daily anger at the silence—or complicity—of the Western world in the face of the atrocities of the apartheid regime. The film also recounts the astonishing discovery, in 2017, of 60,000 of his negatives stored in a Swedish bank vault. Ernest Cole Lost and Found won the Best Documentary prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.