In February 1961, a outstanding outburst befell on the United Nations in New York – jazz artists Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, author Maya Angelou and others crashed the Safety Council to protest the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
That little-remembered demonstration serves because the backdrop to the award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, directed by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez. The movie explores how the U.S. and Belgium conspired to drive Lumumba from energy, with the complicity of the UN secretary common. Even because the plot moved in the direction of a bloody denouement, the U.S. State Division was dispatching a few of America’s nice Black jazz artists to Africa within the function of goodwill ambassadors, making an attempt to paper over its machinations in Congo.
Grimonprez joins the newest episode of Deadline’s Doc Speak podcast to elucidate how he managed to deftly synthesize a lot complicated world historical past, setting it to the beat of Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Lincoln and Roach. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat has emerged as a number one Oscar contender after profitable awards at movie festivals world wide, from Sundance to Thessaloniki in Greece, The Hague, and El Gouna in Egypt. It’s a piece of genius, within the phrases of Doc Speak co-host Matt Carey.
Grimonprez, who’s being honored because the visitor of honor at this 12 months’s Worldwide Documentary Pageant Amsterdam starting this week, speculates on the stature the charismatic Lumumba may need achieved had he not been rubbed out at age 35. As it’s, Lumumba is remembered as an astonishing determine who helped unyoke Africa from its colonial shackles as the primary democratically elected chief of Congo. However his grim destiny was sealed, it is perhaps stated, by Congo’s huge pure sources.
Within the nineteenth century it was Congo’s pure rubber that exterior powers coveted, and within the mid-Twentieth century it was uranium. As we speak, world powers and company pursuits are in search of to extract one thing else from Congo; Grimonprez tells us what it’s.
That’s on the newest version of Doc Speak, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The pod, a 2024 Webby Awards honoree, is a manufacturing of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Our new episode is dropped at you in partnership with Obscured Photos. Hearken to it above or on main podcast platforms together with Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
