Voices of Francophone Cinema Festival: Soundtrack for a Coup d'Etat

Join us for night #4 of the fifth edition of Voices of Francophone Film Festival, dedicated to the theme "Our Freedoms" and curated by Anna-Caroline Prost with Soundrack for a Coup d'Etat, 2025 Oscar® nominee for Best Documentary Feature.

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 by director Johan Grimonprez interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.

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