Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Patrice Lumumba.  

The year is 1960, the 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 from 36-year-old independence leader to Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister—and how corporate and colonial interests, along with machinations at the United Nations, conspired in his assassination.  

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 Black jazz legends who defined the era. 

Pulsating with the energy of the period, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État’s chilling indictment of colonial power roars on in the present day.