AFF: Why don't we start with you saying a little about your work. The reason why you're here at this year's festival and what you hope to get out of participating.

PECK: I'm very happy to be invited to African Film Festival in New York; I always encourage that kind of event because we don't have that much places where we filmmakers can meet, where we can show our work. I thank the U.S., besides the Pan African Film Festival in L.A.; the NY festival is, I think, now very important. I've followed it through the years and I know what role it wants to play, the role that it's playing. And as I say for filmmakers, its always a good opportunity to not only show their work, but to meet with the other filmmakers and to discuss their work & to have an exchange with the public.

AFF: Can you say a little bit about the film, "Lumumba," the making of it and how you thing American audiences will react to it?

PECK: You know, Lumumba, is a film about the assassination of the first Prime Minister of Congo; it is a story where so much has been written about it. The Congo crisis was one of the major crises internationally, after the Cuban crisis, between the east and the west. In Congo, you had more than 600 foreign correspondents. So today to return to the story is, first of all, a challenge because of course, its a new generation now; not many people remember a story that made front page everyday at the time. So, it goes beyond the reality of Congo or even of Africa. It's a story about power; it's a Shakespearean drama between two friends that parted and became enemies. It's the story of political struggle and its important for me, in any case, to tackle the subject because maybe through that kind of story we can begin to understand what's going on in the Third World today. Because most of the time, the press, in particular, tends to present it as a newly situation of Africans fighting between themselves & killing each other; but in reality, it is far more complex and its not a matter of the west being on one side and Africans on the other. The birth of Africa is terribly linked to western expansion.

AFF: Since no African country was actually a colony of the US, many people might be surprised about the connection between the US and Africa politically. Do you think this film enlightens Americans about the US role within in Congo?

PECK: I think this film will help demystify the self-reassuring attitude of most of the American audience; because unfortunately, they know very little about the reality of their country abroad. We usually have the same unique view of American power, trying to be the policemen of the world, which is far beyond the truth. It's a very powerful country indeed but one who is always on the first to defend its own interests and strictly its own interests and not the interest of the world. So this film shows another aspect of the numerous interventions - direct intervention through the CIA or through the UN in the case with Lumumba. And so indeed, I hope we can trigger some discussion about this aspect of the American reality, not only to African reality, but the American reality. Now-a-days, we know, in what terms, the Eisenhower administration or the Kennedy administration have pushed through their goals in Congo and have worked very adamantly to eliminate people like Lumumba or any other Congolese politician who can assume that they can have a real independence for their countries.

AFF: What role do you think the filmmaker has to play? Do you think films can change politics or can they just trigger political discussions?

PECK: Its difficult to talk about it in such general terms. It depends on what stage you're in, in the films you make and what stage you're in, in your political engagement and at what historical moment also you make films. I tend to be very modest and I don't think films change things; films can help the most to understand a situation; sometimes films can trigger something that has already been cooking. But in my case, I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago; its a double fight or triple fight; we're trying to solve many different problems at the same time. I can't even talk about the artistic aspect of filmmaking, which is of course, suffering in the way people watch our films.

When I choose a thematic like Lumumba, it's the content that takes all the place and it's very rare that people ask me about my profession as a filmmaker, that people ask me about the aesthetics of the film, or how I worked with the actors, so its very complex. I don't think there's one answer to that, and if we look at also the production that we have, we are very far. Let's take African film, we tend to think that there is one African cinema. The problem is much larger than that; I don't think we have enough produced African films to be able to talk about what is African cinema. I know people might think otherwise about it. I tend to be very severe on that. We have to have at least enough musicals, crime films, enough tv films, poetic films, soap operas, all kinds of different films to judge. And then we can maybe start to talk about what could be different types of African cinema, but there is no such a thing as African cinema per se.

AFF: -You've dealt with the story of Lumumba two times - once as an experimental documentary in "Lummba, the Death of the Prophet," and then again as a dramatization of the events in your latest film "Lumumba". What made you decide you wanted to look at this story again and do it in a different way?

PECK: The original idea was to do this film as a feature. At the time, I was a young filmmaker and I knew it would be a very important and major project. When I started researching, I came up with different dilemmas that had to do with my own life, with the life of my parents in Congo because they had left Haiti to go work in Congo, to replace the Belgians. Many Haitians, professionals, went there to work. So little by little, I discovered a lot of things, family photos, 8mm films of my family in Congo in the 60s; so all of that became, for me, a very important aspect of the story I wanted to tell. So I decided to do a documentary, which was a very intimate, very personal film and which had nothing to do with this feature film, which deals more directly with Lumumba himself and is also aimed at a much wider public. It's just the course of the development of a subject and I tend, in my work, to be very close to what I feel and to stay close to it.