2025 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary
Remarkable largely unknown footage of a dramatic turning point in world history covering events over three continents concerning a tragic coup in the Congo. Featuring: Maya Angelou, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Patrice Lumumba, Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Dag Hammarskjöld, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, Allen Dulles, Kwame Nkrumah, and many others.
Using a rich tapestry of obscure archival footage, the documentary highlights how U.S. jazz musicians unwittingly became part of an effort to undermine African independence. Other dramatic performances by Khrushchev and Hammarskjöld, and demonstrations organized by Maya Angelou inside the United Nations General Assembly are masterfully intertwined with the efforts of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and pan-African women’s rights organizer Andrée Blouin, to form a free democratic country and the machinations of agents of the CIA, British intelligence, the former head of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Belgian royalty, and mercenary soldiers to crush this effort. All this is told with great coherence and allegiance to historical fact, along with moving evocation of the broad human scale of the events. There has never before been a documentary quite like this.
Tickets: $130 pesos