Soundtrack to a Coup

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 6:30pm to 8:45pm

Library Hall

See the 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary Harper's calls, "a mind-blowingly rich tapestry of research, music, and the jazziest history lesson imaginable..."

Winner! Sundance World Documentary Special Jury Award

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

"Critic’s Pick! Rhythmic and propulsive... uses every instrument cinema affords. The result, in a word, is marvelous."
The New York Times

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat trailer

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