Watercooler Pick
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
- Movie
- Where to Find It: Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play, Amazon Prime
- Release Date: January 4, 2025
- Runtime: 2h 30m
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It’s an expose about a shocking series of events that took place in the early 1960s, when jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed a U.N. Security Council meeting, the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, banged his shoe to denounce America’s segregation policies, and the U.S. turned Louis Armstrong into an ambassador — sending him to the Congo to distract attention as the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.
In addition to Armstrong, jazz greats Dizzie Gillespie and John Coltrane and women’s rights activist Andrée Blouin (Lumumba’s speechwriter) are featured in the film, which is directed by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez – best known for his films Shadow World and Blue Orchids.
You won’t come across many political docs about CIA machinations set to a soundtrack of rumba, classical jazz, and bebop, but as the director explained at its Sundance premiere, “Music is an actor of this global story.”
The events unfold through an impressionistic melding of music interspersed with eyewitness accounts, home movies from the Congo, archival interviews, government memos, and speeches by Lumumba — weaving together an unusual narrative framework that earned the film a Cinematic Innovation Award from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
At two and a half hours, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat simplifies a complex, eye-opening chapter of U.S. and European history, colonialism and covert political machinations while simultaneously paying tribute to several great American music legends, revealing how they were used as ploys by their own government — unbeknownst to them.
With all of the power and percussion of a Louis Armstrong horns ensemble, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is a visceral must-watch that sheds fresh light on an era through an inventive new documentary format.
- Moods: enlighten me, shock me, stretch my mind, transfix me
- Interests: acclaimed and award winning, conversation worthy, history, international, music, politics, true stories
