First pitched at CPH:FORUM, Johan Grimonprez’s feature doc project fuses the promise of African decolonization in the 1960s, the rise of the US civil rights movement and the State Department’s mobilization of ‘jazz ambassadors’ for propaganda purposes. New partners on board from France, Netherlands and Sweden with much broadcast and sales interest, the producers confirm.
Since CPH:FORUM, zap-o-matik, the main producer on Soundtrack to a coup d’état, has partnered with Velvet Films in France (producers of Raoul Peck’s I am not your negro; Baldr Film in the Netherlands (who co-produced Sick, Sick, Sick by Alice Furtado, Cannes Directors Fortnight 2019, KVIFF), and SVT (Sweden) who pre-bought the film for broadcast.
“Several other broadcasters and sales agents have expressed their interest, but we haven’t made any decisions for now, as we are still working on the financing strategy,” confirms co-producer Emmy Oost of Belgian production house Cassette for timescapes.
The film covers the period of instability after the 1961 murder of Congolese PM Patrice Lumumba, the rise of Pan Africanism and the US State Department’s response to international criticism of its race policies at home by forcing diplomacy through jazz.
“[It] is about the promise of decolonization, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination,” said Belgian producer Daan Milius (zap-o-matik) of the 130-minute English/French/Dutch-language creative doc when he pitched it in Copenhagen. He arrives at RE>CONNEXT having secures €205,000 (21%) of his €990,000 budget. The expected delivery date is February 2023.
“It is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in-glove with the privatized military industrial complex to smother this very dream [of self-determination],” Milius added.
The West, seeing the danger of losing access to lucrative ‘colonial riches’, were perturbed by the emerging Pan African movement that Lumumba personified. “Washington, exploiting the hiatus left by the crumbling colonial empires, cooked up a paranoid cold-war narrative to smother the African dream of sovereignty,” the film’s production notes read.
Director Johann Grimonprez added: “The film is as much about the political earthquake in the United Nations in September 1960, when 16 African countries including Congo were admitted to the General Assembly.” This caused a major shift in the balance of power whereby the African and Asian majority together with the Eastern Bloc “was actually calling the shots,” which was deemed a threat by the Western countries.
“Another [aspect of the project] is that the situation in the Congo in 1960 was the Ground Zero, and it was kind of the template for what is still going on today,” Grimonprez continued. “The corporations dictated very much what the situation would be in the Congo. And so what’s going on today in the Congo is not very different. It’s still the same corporations, with the aid of private armies, holding on to what is actually going on in the Congo. And so… this dream of self-determination was completely smothered in something that is very similar today.”
And so to jazz. “A third layer [in the film] is the connection to music, and the music in this sense becomes a protagonist, because what is going on in the Congo was sort of an inspiration for the civil rights movement and specifically to what was going on in jazz,” says producer Milius.
Racist US policies in the 1960 in the face of global interest in the civil rights movement determined that the Eisenhower administration felt compelled to act, and so turned to the likes of Louis Armstrong, who was sent to the Congo as a Jazz Ambassador “as a diversion.”
“It was a response to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s allegations of hypocrisy [by] the US,” Milius told Business Doc Europe. “While there were many civil rights scandals in the US Khrushchev basically said, ‘you preach democracy worldwide, but keep on lynching black people in your own country.’”
Other musicians that were roped in as jazz ambassadors included Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston, all of whom faced the painful dilemma of defending a country (the US) whose record on civil rights, as evidenced by its policies of segregation, was indefensible.
“[They] were sent out to those (so-called) friction zones to, in a way, sell the diplomacy and try to re-conquer the atmosphere of the non-aligned countries,” Milius added.
TV partners on the project are VRT (Belgium) and SVT (Sweden), while financial partners are listed as: Financiers Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF, Belgium), ZKM (Germany), The Arts Research Fund – University College, Ghent-KASK/Hogent (Belgium).
