CPH:DOX 2024 – Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

In February 1961, famous jazz musicians and black female activists storm into the UN headquarters in New York to protest the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister after the country’s independence from colonial Belgium. Congo is rich in uranium and other rare minerals, highly coveted during the Cold War, and has for long attracted the relentless attention of the US and other world powers. To keep the peace, President Eisenhower resorts to an unconventional weapon: Jazz. Louis Armstrong is appointed Jazz Ambassador and sent to Africa as a distraction from the CIA-backed assassination of Lumumba, the first US-backed coup d’état in a post-colonial African country. You might think you know the story of the Cold War, but this one is new- and it is told with a level of detail and a unique stylistic flourish by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez, who with his long-awaited new work establishes his name as one of the world’s most visionary and thorough communicators of the blind spots of world history.