Patrice Lumumba: Last News

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, who was Oscar-nominated for “I Am Not Your Negro,” will be the Guest of Honor at the 56th edition of documentary festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 4-13. During the festival, Peck will deliver a masterclass and present a retrospective of his work, as well as a screening of his latest feature film, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” Emilie Bujès, the festival’s artistic director, said Peck’s work was of “exceptional political impact and cinematographic force.” She added, his films are “inextricably linked to an alternative and engaged way of thinking about the world and its history, embodied by key figures which he has invariably made part of inspiring, precisely articulated and highly literary forms.” In a statement, the festival noted that his films “examine denials from official Western history, shining a light on aspects ignored by this account, often sketching a portrait of politicians or artists who have openly deconstructed it,” such as Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba in 1990’s “Lumumba, La Mort du prophète” and “Lumumba” in 2000, writer James Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro” in 2016, and, most recently, Ernest Cole with last year’s “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” Peck’s work is “a reinvention of activist cinema, which he transforms using a cinematographic, poetic and highly subjective language, freely intermingling genres and formats,” the festival said.

In February 1961, a remarkable outburst took place at the United Nations in New York – jazz artists Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou and others crashed the Security Council to protest the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, whose “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” won an award at this year’s Sundance, will be the guest of honor at the 37th edition of IDFA. The documentary festival, which will take place from Nov. 14 to 24, has also unveiled curated program Dead Angle and Spotlight on Cuba, which focuses on the island’s cinema, alongside live cinema section IDFA on Stage and new media program IDFA DocLab.

Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, whose latest documentary Soundtrack To a Coup D’Etat is expected to be an Oscar contender, has been named Guest of Honor at the upcoming International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.

Murtada Elfadl Juxtaposing the story of the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba with a musical tour of jazzman Louis Armstrong and with the expansion of the United Nations after the independence of many African countries in the 1960s might be tall order. Trickier still would be telling this complex story, full of many characters and plot swerves, in a nonlinear manner while filling the screen with written clues providing context like a bibliography of an academic thesis.

Ben Croll Premiering out of Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition, the impressionistic essay film “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” refracts the plot against Patrice Lumumba through a kaleidoscopic lens. Cutting between historical footage of the UN General Assembly and home movies shot in liberation-era Congo, weaving in a diverse set of perspectives, and setting the pace to a non-stop rhythm of bebop, rumba and classic jazz, director Johan Grimonprez evokes the euphoria of post-colonial possibility and the heartbreak of the dashed hopes and violent reprisals that would ensue.