‘Silver Dollar Road’ Director Raoul Peck on Doc’s Interrogation of Systemic Racism: “When Was America Great, and For Whom?”

Our ancestors left this here for us,” a member of the North Carolina-based Reels family says in the documentary Silver Dollar Road, referring to the 65-acre waterfront property that had long been their financial and spiritual haven. In the late 1970s, a relative of the Reelses cited a legal loophole to claim that he was the land’s rightful owner, after which an investment group called Adams Creek Associates purchased it, presumably intending to build golf courses and luxury homes there. Refusing to let white businessmen displace them, the Reelses ignited a long battle to retain their ancestors’ tract — one that resulted in the eight-year imprisonment of two family members whom courts deemed trespassers because they wouldn’t vacate.

Raoul Peck, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes, chronicles the Reelses’ story in the Amazon documentary. The movie’s foundation is a 2019 ProPublica article written by Lizzie Presser, who introduced Peck to the family. Throughout, he uses interstitial text to contextualize the Reelses’ struggle, at one point stating that Black Americans lost about 90 percent of their farmland during the 20th century.

Although it shares topical parallels with his previous work, the film is more stylistically forthright. Peck tells THR that’s for good reason. 

Your last couple of documentaries were much more sprawling than Silver Dollar Road. They were sort of operatic.

They were much more conceptual.

Silver Dollar Road is straightforward, even if the legal story is quite thorny. For you, was part of the appeal being able to zero in on one family instead of making something more open-ended? 

Yes. Indeed, it’s a different way of approaching a subject for me. I thought about that before I accepted it. American documentary filmmaking is about going into a private story and having a good guy and a bad guy — basically staying in the three-act approach of Hollywood cinema, usually with some sort of climax. I’ve never done that in my whole life as a filmmaker. It’s really key to me to not be a prisoner of a story. The family’s story is compelling and emotional and strong, but I didn’t feel that I was stuck in that little bubble. I had ways to feel the complexity and the bigger picture of the land history. 

I connect it as a triangle between Exterminate All the Brutes, I Am Not Your Negro and Silver Dollar Road. It’s almost part of a trilogy for me. Everything comes back to the core story of this country: land that was stolen from the get-go. Even the idea of owning land is an important European concept that developed in the 16th century. Indigenous people never say, “We own that land.” They say, “We are the caretakers of the land.” Now, land becomes a commodity, the same way that European concept was used to enslave people. The connection is the DNA of America. If it was not tragic, I would smile at the irony of saying, “Pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” There were programs, like the Homestead Act of 1862, that allowed the population to have access to land. But you could only have access to land if you were a citizen, which the Black population was not until the 14th Amendment. So, wherever you turn, we come back to that core story. 

You use historical context to illuminate the family’s story instead of using the family’s story to illuminate history. There are no talking-head experts, for example. Was that structure immediately clear to you?

The model of the talking heads, I found out, is not the proper tool for a lot of the things I want to do. In my early documentaries, I did use talking heads, sometimes for sheer credibility reasons. Today, I feel that I’m allowed to speak in my own voice. I have my strong opinions, always based on very strict and comprehensive research — so I can indulge in my own subjectivity, but my homework is done. In this particular story, I found the perfect characters to tell the story. The Reelses are extraordinary characters. I gave them the stage because those kinds of people never have the stage. There’s always someone speaking for them, which puts them in the role of victims. I don’t want to make the comparison with Martin Scorsese’s film [Killers of the Flower Moon], but some of the criticism about that is, well, the point of view is key. As filmmakers, we are big manipulators. Who’s speaking, and for whom? Film after film, I learned to ask, “Who has the power to tell the story?”

Was your initial involvement with the family after the ProPublica article was published?

Pretty much. The article was bought by JuVee Productions, Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s production company. Together with Amazon, they offered me the project as an executive producer. I thought it was a key story where I could give it more layers, because it’s so tragic and so emotional — and, at the same time, I don’t see those two men [who went to prison] as victims. I feel they are heroes. It’s not a happy end because there is no end in that story. For me, it aligned itself in that long trail of mismanagement, misappropriation, bias, a retelling of history and the whole nonsense of the American dream. It’s the whole absurdity of Make America Great Again. When was it great, and for whom? If you don’t understand the land problem, you don’t understand why there are so many Black people in prison or why the wealth gap is so huge, because there are not many ways to acquire wealth. 

How receptive was the family to having cameras observe them, and to sharing their story that way? 

That’s my job, to make sure I’m accepted, that they trust me. I want them to be able to continue their life without feeling the camera all the time. But that part was already done by Lizzie Presser and her team. ProPublica had sent different camera crews over many months, especially in special moments, like when the two brothers came out of prison. Those images existed. That’s one of the things that authorized me to say, “Well, that can be an incredible film.” I’ve worked all my life with archives. When I was introduced to the family, I went with Lizzie the first time, and I could see how Lizzie was totally accepted and was considered part of the family. And don’t forget, the family has been struggling for at least three decades. They were very conscious that as long as they could not tell the story beyond Carteret County [in North Carolina], they were trapped.

They saw what you were doing as a tool. 

Yeah. I could feel in the first conversation there was doubt: Are you really going to make this film? Most people think a reporter coming in means there will be something on the TV the next evening. The context of documentary filmmaking is much more difficult to grasp, and they would see these DPs coming and filming. They’d open their doors, they’d open their hearts. So when I came, there was also a feeling of “Oh, yes, it’s really going to be a film.”

By DPs, do you mean the ProPublica videographers? Or had other people attempted to make this documentary previously?

Those were people hired by ProPublica. They documented the family over more than two years. There were at least 90 hours of footage. That’s a lot. Even before I went to shoot myself, I made sure that I had a first edit of 40 minutes because I wanted to know: What is the story that those archives tell me? Finding my own story with what existed already was a comfortable, or less complicated, matter. Then I knew exactly what was missing. I had to make the story more current. After all the interviews were made, I could say, “I don’t want any talking heads.” The only ones I kept were the family, the lawyer and Anita Earls, who is a very well-known Supreme Court judge in North Carolina. She represents one of the rare clear voices in the whole mess, from the justice side. 

At the end, we see a kind of denial or obfuscation from the Adams Creek investment group via text. Did you attempt to get somebody from there on camera? 

I refused to go into that because it’s not part of the film. I didn’t want to identify anyone specific because in reality it’s the system — the laws, the history of this country. It’s a more complex response. That’s what we do a lot of the time in filmmaking. It’s easy to find the bad guys and then say, “OK, it’s done.” The concept of showing both sides — all my life, my side was never on the screen. For me, it’s a political decision to say, “No, I want my side to have the full one hour and 30 minutes.” Those are precious minutes. I have, for once, the authorization to tell that story. Why would I waste any minutes to deal with that other side of the story? For what? I wanted to make a film where the Black audience would feel at ease watching, the same way the Reelses felt at ease and safe on their beach. People are angry watching it, but it’s a different type of anger. 

It’s not the same anger that might be conjured up in the true-crime version of this, the four-part series on Netflix that plays into all the tropes we’ve come to expect of that mostly hollow genre. 

Exactly. It was also a key decision not to start with the crime. I started by entering the family compound, being with them, and creating empathy for them and seeing them as real human beings before the drama occurs. If you do the contrary, you are basically pushing them as victims from the get-go, especially for a white, or let’s say dominant, audience. That’s where that anger comes from, because you are with them, whether you are Black or white. You feel it could be your grandmother, it could be your uncle. It was important to establish that, and when injustice comes, that breaks your heart because they’re not just people at a distance. 

What was it like to show the family the completed film for the first time? 

I showed them in a special screening I did in Raleigh for them before picture lock, because that’s what I do. For me, it’s a testimony of our mutual trust.

It gives them the opportunity to let you know how they feel about it before you’ve decided it’s completely finished.

Of course, because all these decisions we’ve talked about are really personal, political decisions. I have to feel that they are on board with that. It was an incredible moment because they were crying, laughing, reacting. And [central family member] Mamie said something that she repeated in Toronto at the Q&A. For her, she felt much lighter because she didn’t feel she still had the weight of the story on her shoulder. The film was going to tell the story for her. 

This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.