It’s been quite a year for thrillingly inventive music documentaries. First there was Gary Hustwit’s Eno, a groundbreaking portrait of the pioneering musician, producer and artist that tore up the rules of cinema and reinvented itself with each new screening. And now there’s Belgian film-maker Johan Grimonprez’s dazzling Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a breathtaking, ideas-packed journey that weaves together American jazz and the geopolitical machinations of the 1950s and 60s. It’s almost reductive to describe this extraordinary essay film as a music documentary – it’s about so much: the cold war; the bloody fingerprints of colonialism in Africa; the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo; Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe. But linking it all is an eye-opening exploration of the politics of jazz, and the music itself, freewheeling and skittish and pulsing through every frame.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/13/coups-colonialism-and-all-that-jazz-new-film-unravels-cold-war-truths-johan-grimonprez-soundtrack-to-a-coup-detat
