Opening at Film Forum on Nov. 1, director Johan Grimonprez’s documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat” is a stunning achievement. Grimonprez weaves history, geopolitics, espionage, and music together to create the aurally and visually stunning, thought-provoking film chronicling the circumstances of the 1960 death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the newly liberated Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a former Belgian colony.
Grimonprez makes use of extensive video footage of global early Cold War political giants such as Malcolm X, Khrushchev, Nkrumah, Nassir, Nehru, and others, woven with music and footage of greats such as Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Art Blakey to capture the hopes, intrigues, and eventual despair of a particular moment in geopolitical time.
Speaking recently to the AmNews, the Belgian-born filmmaker said the project, which captured the Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, took five years to come together and required a deep dive into the United Nations archives. He recalled instructing interns to “Look for all the speakers at the United Nations General Assembly from the 21st of September to mid October.”
The United Nations 15th General Assembly took place Sept. 20, 1960, to Oct. 17, 1960, when there were about 100 countries to the United Nations. Many of those countries were new to the U.N. and populated by people of color. They used the opportunity to continue to advance the notion of complete sovereignty over their nations’ resources, among other things.
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As the title suggests, music is central to the film as a soundtrack and a symbol. “In the film, the music is very much a political agent, a historical agent,” Grimonprez said. “It’s not just that the music illustrates the film, but the music is a protagonist as a historical agent.”
One of the main stories is Louis Armstrong’s State Department-sponsored visit to the DRC in 1960. It points out Armstrong was conflicted, given the amount of racial discrimination in the U.S. However, the film focuses on another, more insidious reason he should have been reluctant, and the music, ubiquitous throughout the film, serves as an ominous reminder: Armstrong was sent as a distraction as the CIA and Belgium carried out its operation to kill Lumumba. “Soundtrack” contains footage of an interview with the head of those operations, Larry Devlin.
Pushing back against the myth that colonized nations were somehow passive, the film highlights the efforts made by former colonies, which in the wake of WWII were successively gaining independence, to carve out an autonomous existence and push back against imperialism. “That’s actually, I think, the story of the United Nations 15th General Assembly, because 16 African countries were going to be admitted, including Congo, and that tips to scale,” Grimonprez said. “It sort of causes a political earthquake where the Afro Asian bloc gains the majority vote, and that was very threatening for both East and West.”
“Soundtrack” makes clear that at key moments, corporations leveraged their relationships with governments to move their agendas forward. “The film is trying to dig into that pivotal moment, at the beginning of the ’60s when Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected premier [in the Congo], and how the downfall was orchestrated by the mining industry,” said Grimonprez. Music intensely and insistently drives the film forward from chronicling initial hope to its devastating and inevitable conclusion.
Grimonprez also made a point of including footage of modern-day Congo, drawing a line from its historical significance on the world stage to today. “I didn’t want the film to be a nostalgic trap,” said Grimonprez, “because I think what was set in motion then is actually, in an exponential way, still going on today in the East Congo. I could not not talk about what’s going on today, because it’s the same template, but even worse.”
An iPhone commercial stands out against the rest of the footage in the film, Girmonprez said. “The iPhone commercial is literally a wake-up call. It’s somebody waking up from the iPhone, and then we have the statistic afterward saying there’s $24 trillion worth of conflict minerals still in the ground.”
Another triumph of the film is its highlighting the position of women, as pawns, instruments of corporate greed, and s agents of their own liberation. There is an interview with Daphne Park, a British intelligence officer stationed in Congo, who explained how political division is strategically created in numerous nations.
“Soundtrack” also brings to the fore Andree Blouin, the glamorous yet tough-as-nails advisor to Lumumba. Blouin, born in the Central African Republic, was a political writer, organizer, and speaker who was instrumental in a number of liberation movements in Africa and headed the women’s wing of the Congolese Independence Party.
The film also brings attention to how rape is used as a war tactic. “We have the private militia using rape as a tool of war to empty villages,” said Grimonprez. “If you [have] a map of East Congo and you see the sites of all the mining areas, and where there is a huge amount of mineral deposits, and then the statistics of raped women, there’s a one-to-one correlation.”
A woman singer provides the film’s coda: Abbey Lincoln’s piercing, defiant, extended wail on the floor of the United Nations Security Council that she, Max Roach, and a cadre of other artists crashed in protest in the wake of Lumumba’s murder.
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