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Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

Dir: Johan Grimonprez
Cast: Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Miles Davis
150mins   2024   Belgium | France | Netherlands   TBC   French | English | Dutch | Russian    Subtitled   

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.

Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo's leader Patrice Lumumba.

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.

'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' - Tomris Laffly, Harper's Bazaar



Showtimes


Fri 15 November

19:45