Get the latest gossip
First Look: Kaleidoscopic Sundance Doc ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Dizzies With Burst of Pop and Politics (EXCLUSIVE)
The impressionistic essay film 'Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,' premiering at Sundance, explores mid-century world history with a musical flair.
“I was already mesmerized by the story of Andrée Blouin, who was an independence leader, an advisor to [Ghana president] Kwame Nkrumah and chief of protocol for [first Congolese prime minister] Patrice Lumumba, but who was almost written out of history. Grimonprez traced that wider picture by pairing Blouin’s home-movies and personal recollections – together offering an eyewitness account of Lumumba’s brief tenure – alongside a chorus of contemporaneous voices and archival sources, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, U.N. envoy Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane all stepping into the spotlight at different points. Still, as the title might suggest, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” often takes a more caustic view of the subject, particularly as Grimonprez explores the various ways America’s jazz greats were used as subterfuge for CIA plots – including the effort to overthrow Lumumba.
Or read this on Variety