Join Strategy & Soul Theater
at the Pan African Film & Arts Festival

Film showing of

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
Directed by Johan Grimonprez

February 11th 2025 @ 8:30pm
The Culver Theater – Auditorium #6
9500 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

Strategy & Soul Film Theater is proud to partner with and support the Pan African Film & Arts Festival.

Join us at the Culver Theater on February 11th at 8:30PM as we view a film about the work of the clash between Black musicians and the CIA as the US plays a pivitol role in the assassination the first African revolutionary prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo

The Strategy & Soul Film Theater has 30 tickets available for members and supporters for $13.00 (general admission is $16 from PAFF)

Description

United Nations, 1960. There has been a CIA-backed coup in Congo. The Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention. Capturing the moment when African politics and American jazz collided, this historical essay is a fast roller coaster illuminating the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, and the political use of African American classical music. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate. As riveting as it is magnificent.

Shortlisted, Best Documentary Feature - 97th Academy Awards – 2025