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Director: JOHAN GRIMONPREZ

150min.

Language: IN ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

 

From the Congo to Harlem and back again, Johan Grimonprez’s kinetic, urgent documentary delivers the politics of decolonization in jazz form, replete with virtuosic archival riffs, historical text in the form of Blue Note album covers, and musical performances by jazz legends (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone) who in the ‘60s doubled as cultural ambassadors to Africa. Their roles as unknowing decoys in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Congo’s prime minister Patrice Lumumba threads through this deeply researched, densely textured tapestry — which scrambles the simplistic good guys/bad guys narrative, foregrounds powerful women behind the revolution (Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and activist/chief advisor to Lumumba, Andrée Blouin), and sounds a call to clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions in the guise of liberal values.

CRITIC’S PICK. “A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous…[It’s] a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency.”
– Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times