Opening 6 Feb 2025
Directed by:
Johan Grimonprez
Writing credits:
Daan Milius
Belgian director Johan Grimonprez has crafted a riveting, fact-based documentary covering a period during the 1960s Cold War that stretches across three continents. Moving at the speed and tempo of jazz music, astonishing archival footage, including interviews with many of those involved—wittingly or not—is a remarkable, haunting, and sad exposé of politics run amuck, lives lost, and chicanery of unbelievable proportions. The aim? Influence and redirect history for one country or another’s advantage.
Africans, particularly young independent/political leaders fed up with European colonial rule, declared independence resulting in the 1960 Year of Africa. Seventeen African nations joining the United Nations has altered colonial powers control, focusing attention on the growing Pan-African sentiments. One country, Belgium’s Republic of Congo, reemerged as Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with Patrice Lumumba its first prime minister. The good Belgian King Baudouin, anxious to retain the southern resource-rich Katanga Province, found American President Eisenhower to be like-minded—think uranium, i.e., atom bombs. Concurrently, after respectfully declining, the American icon Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong agreed to the government’s cultural ambassadorship and toured as Jazz Ambassador, including in Africa. During a UN General Assembly and in protest against the neo-colonialist power-grab of the DRC, the furious Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is shown banging his shoe on his desk, condemning the UN’s participation in the overthrow of Lumumba and America’s color bar, i.e., racial hypocrisy, demanding worldwide decolonization. Between the Cold War and African control of the UN, the DRC became critical. Armstrong, sent by the State Department, i.e., CIA, had his tour of Africa just happen to coincide with a coup—post colonization’s first—culminating with jazz greats drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln crashing a UN session in February 1961 causing a commotion and creating havoc to protest Lumumba’s assassination. UN diplomats were more-or-less shocked speechless, while the world was euphoric with hope.
Grimonprez' film is so tight, and well-structured watching is like time-traveling; Rik Chaubet’s editing is unequivocally masterful. He weaves the crème de la crème of jazz, political bigshots, activists, and artists: Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Dwight Eisenhower, Marie Daulne “Zap Mama,” Allen Dulles, Duke Ellington, René Magritte, Rock-a-Mambo, Malcolm X, Dag Hammarskjöld, et al. This incredible soundtrack is as compelling and informative as it’s fascinatingly engrossing, powerful. (Marinell Haegelin)
