Join us for a community screening of SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP d’ETAT (Johan Grimonprez, 2024). Featuring Louis Armstrong, Andrée Blouin, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Patrice Lumumba, Nina Simone, Malcolm X.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Academy Award® for Documentary Feature Film.
“A vibrant, jazz-led history lesson on colonial machinations in the Congo… Cutting between home movies, official texts, historical footage, and Lumumba’s speeches [the film] uses an endless rhythm of rumba and jazz to weave this all together… Editor Rik Chaubet and sound designer Ranko Pauković seamlessly evoke joy and tension (and everything in between) through their combination of visuals and sound…a stirring rally that’s uniquely cinematic in the way so many elements come together so precisely and yet still feels so organic as well.”– David Opie, IndieWire
CRITIC’S PICK. “A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous…[It’s] a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency.”– Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times