Cole was a black South African photographer whose work illuminated the reality of life under apartheid, but Raoul Peck’s excellent documentary unearths a life of exile and homesickness

Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck won an Oscar nomination for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin, whose writings were voiced by Samuel L Jackson; now he takes a comparable approach to a more elusive and in some ways more complex subject. This is the black South African photographer Ernest Cole whose fierce pictures of life under apartheid brought this political reality home to the US and the west, and played a real part in the pressure brought to bear on the South African government. But it was Cole’s terrible destiny to live as a stateless exile, mostly in the US, finally dying penniless in 1990 just as Nelson Mandela was being released.

Cole died of pancreatic cancer, but...