Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat - Documentary Film

2025 release.    Region 1 DVD

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.

Constructed entirely from archive footage, Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat is an impressive cinema essay fusing Jazz and African decolonisation in an historical rollercoaster told through a quartet of voices from an activist, a diplomat, a writer and a world leader.

Featuring Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus providing the soundtrack and Malcolm X,  Nikita Khrushchev, and many more providing the eye-opening world-politics of the cold war era.