In the middle of the Cold War in 1961, Jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed the UN Security Council in protest against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo.

The documentary ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ from award-winning filmmaker Johan Grimonprez (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Double Take) takes a deep dive into the pivotal events when jazz and politics intertwined with the fight for decolonization on the horizon.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, winning the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation. The film has also been screened at other film festivals including the 67th San Francisco International Film Festival.

Release Date

Directed by Johan Grimonprez, ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ opens in the US at New York Film Forum on November 1, 2024.

Synopsis

From the Congo to Harlem and back again, Johan Grimonprez’s kinetic, urgent documentary delivers post-colonial politics 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. 

“It’s important to question the rules of how you make films. In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, there is this constant play between fiction and documentary, between intimate stories and the global picture. I like it when you feel two things at once.” said director Johan Grimonprez in an interview with Cineuropa.

Reviews

Tomris Laffly in a Harper’s Bazaar review praised Grimonprez’s direction of the documentary, writing, “What Grimonprez creates here is a mind-blowingly rich tapestry of research, music, and the jazziest history lesson imaginable, with freewheeling beats and riffs echoing into today with urgent purpose.”

Christopher Llewellyn Reed in a Hammer to Nail review also praised the documentary, writing, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat offers many things at once: masterful history lesson, insightful polemic, and cinematic tour de force. Come for the violent saga, stay for the musical anecdotes. Most of all, marvel at how it is all stitched together.”

Trailer

Watch the official trailer for ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.’