Who knew that jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington were part of the CIA’s plot to assassinate Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba?
With Sundance-winning documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” the music of political uprising is paired with the CIA’s squashed plans to overthrow an African government. Johan Grimonprez (“Double Take,” “Shadow World”) directs the 1960s-set feature that charts post-colonial international relations through jazz.
The official synopsis reads: “From the Congo to Harlem and back again, Johan Grimonprez’s kinetic, urgent documentary delivers post-colonial politics in jazz form, replete with virtuosic archival riffs, historical text in the form of Blue Note album covers, and musical performances by jazz legends (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone) who in the ‘60s doubled as cultural ambassadors to Africa. Their roles as unknowing decoys in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Congo’s prime minister Patrice Lumumba threads through this deeply researched, densely textured tapestry – which scrambles the simplistic good guys/bad guys narrative, foregrounds powerful women behind the revolution (Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and activist/chief advisor to Lumumba, Andrée Blouin), and sounds a call to clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions in the guise of liberal values.”
The documentary begins in 1961, when the U.S. State Department sent jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. The film includes eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba, and a veritable canon of jazz icons.
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation. Writer/director Grimonprez was later honored with tributes at the SF International Film Festival and IDFA. Belgian multimedia filmmaker Grimonprez will be the guest of honor at IDFA. The feature will also screen at HIFF.
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is produced by Daan Milius and Rémi Grellety.
The IndieWire review for the documentary highlighted that “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” isn’t a “history lesson in the traditional sense,” given its use of songs in lieu of narration.
“The music binds this all together with vibrant pacing that flows between different times and locations like the freewheeling jazz at the heart of these historical events,” the review reads. “Legendary African-American musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone were sent as decoys to deflect attention from America’s first African post-colonial coup, unbeknownst to the actual artists of course. […]Yet music isn’t just a tool for subterfuge. Drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln directly drew inspiration from the independence movement in Africa to later crash the Security Council in protest, and ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ effectively does the same thing by using jazz to reframe the history books that Grimonprez and other Belgians grew up reading.”
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” premieres November 1 at Film Forum in New York through Kino Lorber. The film will open November 15 in the U.K. from Modern Films. Check out the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
