Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

CRITIC’S PICK! “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…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

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 the Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez explores a moment when jazz, colonialism, and espionage collided, constructing a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. The result is a revelatory documentary 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 that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.

“One of the year’s very best documentaries…a riveting, deeply researched archival mixtape with the breadth of a period epic, the soul of an activist march and the pulse-racing energy of a cloak-and-dagger thriller.” – Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

"A sprawling, swinging work of 20th-century history...the film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn." – Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal