Please join us for this film screening and discussion
hosted by the United Nations Association of New York
Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat
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Johan Grimonprez
Director
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Tuesday | 7 January 2025 | 7:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Admission
UNA Members: $10
Non-Members: $15
Film Forum
209 West Houston Street
between 6th Avenue and Varick (7th Avenue)
New York, NY 10014
7:00 p.m. | Film Screening
9:30 p.m. | Q+A
Note: this is a 3-hour event. Screening begins promptly at 7:00 p.m. followed by a Q+A panel discussion
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Registration for this event coming soon
United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup.
• Special Jury Award | 2024 Sundance Film Festival
• Shortlisted for the Academy Awards Oscar
Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in his magnificent essay film Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba.
The film includes 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 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.
Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.
We invite you to attend a special screening of this powerful and widely acclaimed film, with director Johan Grimonprez present after the film for an interaction with the audience.
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From the Reviews
“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 (Critic’s Picks)
“A sprawling, swinging work of 20th-century history… Dazzling musical energy, complex narrative sweep and [a] dizzying cast of characters… a heroic plunge into the archives…[Grimonprez] makes use of a vast array of old footage, stringing it together with a blend of spontaneity and internal logic reminiscent of a great jazz solo… The director makes gripping use of the memoir of Andrée Blouin, a woman born in French-colonial Africa who became a close advisor to Lumumba and at certain points seemed to have lived episodes lifted from a spy novel, smuggling documents across international borders and narrowly escaping assassination attempts.” — Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal
“A case study of decolonization, neo-imperialism, cultural exploitation, and political murder… I don’t think I’ve seen a better movie-movie all year.” — J. Hoberman, Film Comment
“Thrilling, galvanizing… crackling with energy, ideas and formal daring… Political history has never felt so energising and dynamically alive as it does here.” — Wendy Ide, Screen International
“Bravura… intertwines jazz, history, and the taste of a spy thriller… a mind-blowingly rich tapestry of research, music, and the jazziest history lesson imaginable, in part delivered through fact-based title cards designed like renowned covers of Blue Note albums, with their freewheeling beats and riffs echoing into today with urgent purpose.” — Tomris Laffy, Harper’s Bazaar
“A vibrant, jazz-led history lesson on colonial machinations in the Congo… Cutting between home movies, official texts, historical footage, and Lumumba’s speeches [the film] uses an endless rhythm of rumba and jazz to weave this all together… Editor Rik Chaubet and sound designer Ranko Pauković seamlessly evoke joy and tension (and everything in between) through their combination of visuals and sound... a stirring rally that’s uniquely cinematic in the way so many elements come together so precisely and yet still feels so organic as well.” — David Opie, IndieWire
Johan Grimonprez
Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, going beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain, to weave new pathways in how we perceive our realities.
Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Our histories and memories are not only a means to reimagine our contested past, but also tools to negotiate our shared presents. In Wonderland, the Queen rephrases it to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Grimonprez’s feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), DOUBLE TAKE (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and SHADOW WORLD (2016, in combination with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein) premiered at the Tribeca Festival and went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Traveling the festival circuit from the Berlinale, Sundance to Tribeca, Grimonprez’s films have garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. They have been acquired by PBS, NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.
Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London.
Grimonprez is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) and The Kamel Mennour Galerie (Paris) and he is published by Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart.
Visit johangrimonprez.be for more info
Watch the trailer for SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT
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