IN CINEMA

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT

Screening: Sunday, March 16 at 3PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price

Johan Grimonprez, 150 min. 2024

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s engrossing essay-film examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Congo’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. The year is 1961, Voice of America Jazz Hour broadcasts the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie behind the Iron Curtain, while a wave of decolonization movements tear through the African continent and the struggle for civil rights marches on stateside. Beat by beat, Grimonprez traces Lumumba’s rise to become Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister—and how corporate and colonial interests, along with machinations at the United Nations, conspired in his assassination. Deeply researched, the film interweaves archival records, home movies, newly unearthed speeches by Lumumba, and published memoirs by Congolese activists and writers with the story of the jazz legends who defined the era. Pulsating with the energy of the period, Soundtrack To A Coup D’etat’s chilling indictment of colonial power roars on in the present day.

Director Johan Grimoperez will be present with other special guests!