Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'État earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 97th ceremony in 2025 — only the second time a Belgian-led documentary has been nominated in the category, after Marc Henri Wajnberg's Kinshasa Kids-era work. It also won Best Documentary at the European Film Awards 2024 and premiered at Cannes the same year as a special non-competition screening.

Grimonprez is a Belgian video and essay-film artist whose work has shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery; Soundtrack is his most accessible feature-length work to date. The film draws together UN debates around the Congo crisis, declassified CIA archive material, and concert footage of Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach — particularly Roach and Lincoln's protest at a 1961 UN Security Council session. Andrée Blouin, the Central African political activist who served as Patrice Lumumba's chief of protocol, is one of the film's central archival voices.

The score and music programming were assembled with collaboration from the families of the jazz musicians involved, including Maya Angelou's estate; Angelou had been a member of the same protest group at the UN. The film is part of a wider re-engagement with the Lumumba era in European cinema during the 2020s, alongside Raoul Peck's continuing work and the Belgian state's official restitution of Lumumba's tooth in 2022; Grimonprez has been outspoken in interviews about the coloniser's account of decolonisation as a continuing scholarly responsibility.