Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Dir. Johan Grimonprez. 2024, 150 mins. Belgium, France, Netherlands. DCP. In this uniquely kinetic and percussive essay film, director Johan Grimonprez revisits and reanimates a moment when African politics and American jazz collided. It begins in 1960 at the United Nations where the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, and Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe. The U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from a CIA-backed coup and 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 is a timely interrogation of colonial history as well as a riveting, dynamically constructed evocation of the inseparability of music and historical movements. 

Tickets: $17.50 / $12 senior and students / $10 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership. 

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