Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024)
Director: Johan Grimonprez Run Time: 150 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2024
Starring: Abbey Lincoln, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Max Roach, Patrice Lumumba
Country: Belgium, France, Netherlands
Language: French, English, Dutch, Russian
About the film:
In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.
About the filmmaker:
Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is most known for his films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) which the Guardian included in its article From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works, Double Take (2009) and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), based on the book by Andrew Feinstein. Grimonprez wrote and directed the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination.
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