Raoul Peck in production on Haiti doc ‘The Hands That Held The Knives'

Raoul Peck is in production on The Hands That Held The Knives, his latest documentary about the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.

Haitian-born Peck is producing through his Velvet Films alongside Jigsaw Productions, with Imagine Documentaries, Anonymous Content, and Double Agent, who are also financing the project.

Editing is underway and shooting continues in Haiti, the US, Canada, France, and North Africa.

More than two years in the making, the documentary thriller is described as being in the vein of Graham Greene or John Le Carré and explores the politics of Haiti and its relationship with the United States, corruption, and weapons trafficking.

The timeline runs up to present day as gangs control most of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince in the stricken Caribbean nation. Peck secured unprecedented access to many of the characters involved and filmed secretly in Haiti’s prisons, and there is a chance encounter with a fugitive who was an eyewitness to the murder.

Moise served as Haiti’s 43rd president from 2017 until his assassination in 2021 following years of political unrest.

Peck serves as producer alongside Alex Gibney for Jigsaw, and Blair Foster, Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, and Dana O’Keefe for Double Agent

Sara Bernstein is executive producer for Imagine, David Levine and Jessica Grimshaw, and Teddy Schwarzman, Yariv Milchan, and Michael Heimler.

“This is a story that only Raoul Peck can tell,” said Gibney. “A former minister of culture in Haiti, Raoul has been in the belly of the beast of Haiti’s politics and is the only filmmaker alive with the knowledge of the country and the extraordinary skill as a filmmaker to be able to tell this tale, which has global implications, as governments fall, one by one, to the ruthless pursuit of money and power.”

Peck’s documentaries include Bafta and Cesar winner I Am Not Your Negro, Silver Dollar Road, and HBO mini-series Exterminate All The Brutes.

AC Independent, Double Agent, and Range Media Partners represent worldwide sales rights.

This story originally appeared no our sister site Screen