Persistence of Vision Award-winner Johan Grimonprez Blends Cold War Politics and Cool Jazz

During World War I, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo but was then the Belgian Congo, supplied rubber crucial to the war effort. In World War II, the country supplied uranium the Manhattan Project needed as it developed the atomic bomb. During the Vietnam war era, copper from Congo aided the American war effort. These days the region supplies conflict minerals and minerals crucial to electric cars and cell phones.

Those factoids—what Grimonprez calls the “Congolese algorithm”—explaining how important the African nation is to Western interests come from filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, SFFILM’s 2024 Persistence of Vision award winner. The Belgian filmmaker brings his latest, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat to the Festival to accompany the award ceremony and onstage conversation. The winner of a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival for cinematic innovation, the documentary is a heady mix of Cold War politics and cool jazz that investigates the 1961 assassination of what was then the Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba.

“What the film is zooming in on is the ground zero moment in the beginning of the 1960s when so many colonies became independent,” Grimonprez says during a recent call from Greece, where he was traveling.

“There was this sort of hope of the Global South waking up and pursuing its own dream, it was actually smothered by a neocolonialist movement and neocolonialist grab of resources by the West and the United States. The story in the film is of what happened and what is still going on today.”

Johan Grimonprez’s History at the SFFILM Festival

Grimonprez is no stranger to the Festival. He first attended in 1999 when his first feature DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a deep dive into the history of airplane hijacking and revolution, screened. Then in 2016, the Festival screened Shadow World, his documentary about the international arms trade based on Andrew Feinstein’s book of the same name. For this latest work, Grimonprez has something of a personal connection: He is Belgian and the conspiracy against Lumumba included Belgian elements, starting with King Baudouin I. Belgium’s ruler had prior knowledge of an assassination plot but, bitter over losing his colony, said nothing.

“This is something that was silenced for a long time,” Grimonprez says. “The parliamentary commission on the murder of Patrice Lumumba only happened in 2001. Even then, the [extent of what happened] is not fully acknowledged; the conclusions were sort of not 100% sort of accurate and decisive.”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is Grimonprez’s attempt at a more accurate and decisive reckoning of what happened to Lumumba, setting the assassination within the context of colonial history, liberation, and the Cold War and finding the conspiracy that led up to it. At the same time, the United States engaged in a program of propaganda under the guise of entertainment, sending jazz musicians to perform in newly free Africa, while in the US musicians like drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln used their art as a form of protest.

All of these things, plus politicking in Africa and the United Nations proving to be anything but are part of Grimonprez’s kaleidoscopic documentary that is made up almost entirely of archival footage. A living history lesson unfolds of infighting at the United Nations, CIA shenanigans, and Congo and other newly liberated nations’ first steps of self-determination as First World nations and corporations seek to throttle those efforts. The “soundtrack” in the title is literal. The film is broken down into chapters with graphics suggesting album cuts from the Blue Note catalog. Music is omnipresent with performances from Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and more embellishing and commenting on history unfolding.

“You know, when independence was demanded by the Congolese roundtable, the parliamentarians brought their musicians, they brought African jazz,” Grimonprez says. “Music was very much part of the political agency.”

“The film is called A Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Music clips but with academic footnotes,” he adds. “It’s like what Hitchcock did with North by Northwest. It’s the James Bond genre where comedy turns into a thriller. It’s interesting to explore. Like, for me, you have a jazz composition but then what’s added on top is a UN vote or a speech by Lumumba or a roundtable discussion or Nikita Khrushchev banging on his shoe. The politics become part of the jazz composition. I like where the music turns into politics and politics turns into music and exploring the boundaries of what it stands for.”

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

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