Fresh from the success of his James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born director Raoul Peck tackles the early days of the friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as they struggle to establish the Communist Party and complete the Communist Manifesto. Peck and his legendary screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer (Chantal Ackerman’s Golden Eighties, André Téchiné’s Scene of the Crime, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse) revel in the world of ideas and hopes for the future embodied in these two world-historical figures in a cerebral and intelligent period drama.
Listen to our review of The Young Karl Marx in our May film podcast. It starts at the 5.05 mark…