SF Film Festival 2024: Spotlight on Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat

The annual San Francisco Film Festival is currently presenting their 2024 festival. They are offering a schedule of narrative, documentary and independent films showing now until Sunday, April 28th. SF Film has reduced the days of the festival to five this year due to a combination of venues that have closed down during the past year. This year, the festival’s community focus is going out to the Presidio/Marina area of San Francisco with screenings at the Marina Theater, the Premier Theater at One Letterman and the Vogue Theater.

One of the impressive highlights of this year’s festival was the Persistence of Vision award which was given this year to Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez.

His film “Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat” is a mesmerizing documentary where Jazz becomes a successful smokescreen for western capitalists such as the US and its allies efforts, as well meaning musicians diplomatic missions offer cover for a conspiracy to stage a coup against the Democratically elected Republic of the Congo Prime minister Patrice Lumumba.

This fascinating film focuses on the US led efforts to engineer its first post colonial coup by weaponizing music by appointing a jazz ambassador. The rich and powerful jazz stylings of Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong are the visual counterpoint that tells the story of Western nations conspiring against the Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to protect capitalist interests.

Set in the early 1960 Cold War era, the documentary exposes how the US, Belgium and other Western interests plotted first a coup and then the assassination of the Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The film combines interviews, archival footage and clips of stunning performances of Lincoln and Roach to allow the viewer to connect the dots of this violent historical era all of it set to the soundtrack of cool jazz. The film’s images are powerful since we revisit the cold war era including archival footage of Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Adlai Stevenson and others.

Other films that are worthy of your patronage can be found by visiting the SF Film website at www.sffilm.org.