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Film Data
Soundtrack To A Coup d'Etat  2024
Director:  Johan Grimonprez
Producer:
  Daan Milius and Rémi Grellety
Art Director:
  Hans Lettany (graphics and titles)
Editor:
  Rik Chaubet
Screenplay:
  Johan Grimonprez
Director of Photography:
  Jonathan Wannyn
slideshow
Cast:
spacer1 Dag Hammarskjöld
spacer1 Nikita Khrushchev
spacer1 Patrice Lumumba
spacer1 Andrée Blouin
spacer1 Marie Daulne
Narrator
spacer1 In Koli Jean Bofane
Narrator
spacer1 Patrick Cruise O'Brien
Narrator
spacer1
spacer1 Dag Hammarskjöld spacer1 Nikita Khrushchev spacer1 Patrice Lumumba
spacer1 Andrée Blouin spacer1 Marie Daulne spacer1 In Koli Jean Bofane
spacer1 Patrick Cruise O'Brien spacer1 spacer1
spacer1 Dag Hammarskjöld spacer1 Nikita Khrushchev
spacer1 Patrice Lumumba spacer1 Andrée Blouin
spacer1 Marie Daulne spacer1 In Koli Jean Bofane
spacer1 Patrick Cruise O'Brien spacer1

Synopsis:
In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s colour bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.

Director Johan Grimonprez (Double Take, 2009) presents us with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving “algorithm of Congo Inc.”

In addition to Bofane’s observations, Grimonprez invokes a veritable canon of African American jazz music to animate a rich fabric of griot texts, eyewitness accounts, official government memos, and testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives to shine light on one of the most insidious political machinations of the 20th century: how the Belgian monarchy, the United States government, and multinational corporations colluded to weaponise art institutions and legendary jazz musicians as cover for covert operations to assassinate Congo’s premiere prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a timely story of precedent that speaks to today’s geopolitical terrain, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and around the world.

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