Film Forum will present the US theatrical premiere of Johan Grimonprez’s SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT, opening on Friday, November 1.

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. 

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. 

Grimonprez’s feature films include DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by The Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), DOUBLE TAKE (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and SHADOW WORLD (2016, in combination with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein). Grimonprez’s films have garnered several Best Director awards, an Independent Spirit Award, and have been acquired by PBS, NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.