One morning in February 1961, singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach burst into the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the newly independent Congo. Sixty protesters scream, pound their fists, stomp their heels, and clash with unprepared guards while diplomats look on in shock.
Six months earlier, sixteen new independent African countries are admitted to the United Nations, causing a political earthquake that shifts the majority of votes away from the old colonial powers. Decolonization is turning the world upside down, instilling a sense of hope. The Cold War is at its peak when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly, reacting to the neocolonial power grab in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Condemning segregation in the USA and the UN’s complicity in Lumumba’s overthrow, he calls for immediate decolonization worldwide. To retain control over the wealth of the former Belgian Congo, Belgian king Baudouin finds a loyal ally in the Eisenhower administration, who fear losing access to one of the world’s largest uranium supplies, a mineral vital for the creation of the atomic bomb.
The U.S. State Department jumps into action: jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong is sent to win the hearts and minds of Africa. Unknowingly, Armstrong becomes a smokescreen to divert attention from the first postcolonial coup in Africa, which lead to the murder of Congo’s first democratically elected leader. Malcolm X openly supports Lumumba and his efforts to create the United States of Africa.
While the Black jazz ambassadors unknowingly perform amidst secret CIA operations, Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: how to represent a country where segregation is still in effect.
Jazz and decolonization intertwine in a forgotten Cold War episode where the greatest musicians took the political stage, and oppressed politicians inadvertently became leading singers. The story of undermining Africa’s struggle for self-determination is told from the perspectives of women’s rights activist and politician Andrée Blouin from the Central African Republic, Irish diplomat and enfant terrible Conor Cruise O’Brien, Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, and Nikita Khrushchev.
Who owns our imagination in a world of existential dizziness where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can connect contradictions, who can glide between the languages given to us to become a time traveler on the wings of imagination? Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat dances on the boundaries of theory and practice, art and film, transcending the dualism of fiction and fact, the Other and the self, trying to find new paths of perception. Using media archaeology, Grimonprez gives a broader view of globalization and reexamines our collective imagination framed by the fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. Proposing new narratives to tell our important and intimate stories, his work emphasizes how multifaceted our reality is. Our histories and memories are not just a means of reimagining our contentious past, but tools of negotiating our shared present. Or as the Queen says to Alice in Wonderland, “It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Awards and festivals:
Sundance Film Festival (2024) – world premiere, Special Jury Award for Artistic Innovation; Sofia International Film Festival (2024) – Grand Prix; Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (2024) – Audience Award; IndieLisboa (2024); Docville (2024) – Best Belgian Documentary; The Hague Movies That Matter Festival (2024) – Special Mention; Cleveland International Film Festival (2024); San Francisco International Film Festival (2024)
Johan Grimonprez (1962) is a Belgian multimedia artist, director, and curator. His films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, highlighted by The Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), Double Take (2009, with writer Tom McCarthy), and Shadow World (2016, with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein), which premiered at Tribeca and was awarded in Edinburgh. Grimonprez’s films have been screened at renowned festivals from Berlinale to Sundance to Tribeca, and have won several awards for best direction, including the ZKM International Media Award, Independent Spirit Award, and the Black Pearl Award in Abu Dhabi. They have been broadcast on PBS, NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4. Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), and MoMA. His works are part of the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) and The Kamel Mennour Gallery (Paris), and his works are published by Hatje Cantz (Stuttgart). More information can be found at johangrimonprez.be.