Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'État was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 97th ceremony in 2025. Soundtrack premiered in the World Documentary Competition at Sundance in 2024, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards that year.

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

The music was programmed in collaboration with the families of the jazz musicians involved, among them Maya Angelou's estate; Angelou had belonged to the same protest group at the UN. The film is part of a wider return to the Lumumba era in European cinema in the 2020s, alongside Raoul Peck's continuing work and the Belgian state's official restitution of Lumumba's tooth in 2022. Grimonprez has argued in interviews that interrogating the coloniser's account of decolonisation is a continuing scholarly responsibility.