Johan Grimonprez

In September 1960 Congo had entered the UN world body together with 15 other newly independent African countries.

As a result, the balance of the General Assembly majority vote tipped to the expanded Afro-Asian bloc.

Taking advantage of the situation, Nikita Khrushchev, the shoe-banging leader of the Soviet bloc, invited all the heads of state to discuss demilitarisation and decolonisation at the forthcoming General Assembly in New York.

By October 1960, racist policies of the US and the global interest in the civil rights movement gave ground for Soviet accusations of hypocrisy.

The Eisenhower administration, in an attempt to restore its image, turns to a most unconventional weapon: Jazz.

Louis Armstrong is dispatched as a Jazz Ambassador to the Congo, as a diversion from the unfolding CIA-backed coup against Lumumba.

But as more and more jazz ambassadors perform alongside covert CIA operations, the likes of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: How to represent a country where racial segregation is still law of the land?

The film was announced in variety and pitched at CPH:Forum 2021.

The fillm was selected for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Documentary Competition where it won the Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation.

Shadow World is a documentary about the international weapons trade.

On February 16, 1961, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash a UN Security Council meeting to protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime-minister of the Congo.

Belgian embassies worldwide have to close their doors, as demonstrators are pelting eggs or simply setting the Missions ablaze.

Belgium had drawn Congo into an international intrigue that tore the country apart in less than a month after its independence.

Lumumba, like Nkrumah in Ghana and Nasser in Egypt, claimed that the riches of the land should become the riches of its people.

Western powers, coveting colonial riches, took fright at the 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.

Johan Grimonprez (born 1962) is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator.

Grimonprez was born in 1962 in Roeselare, Belgium.

After studying cultural anthropology, he went on to complete his studies in photography and mixed media at Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.

Grimonprez received an MFA in Video & Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In 1993, Grimonprez was accepted into Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands.

In 1993, Grimonprez worked on the series Besmette Stad for the program Ziggurat on Belgian television.

His films are characterised by a criticism of contemporary media manipulation, described as: "an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history."

This films "speak to the need to see history at a distance, but at the same time to speak from inside it".

Other themes include the relationship between the individual and the mainstream image, the notion of zapping as "an extreme form of poetry", and the questioning of our consensus reality, which Grimonprez defines as: "a reality that is entangled with the stories we tell ourselves in the worldview we agree on sharing."

Grimonprez claims that "Hollywood seems to be running ahead of reality. The world is so awash in images that we related to 9/11 through images we had already projected out into the world. In a sense, fiction came back to haunt us as reality. A perpetual distraction, this illusion of abundance staged by techno-magic hid the ugly face of an info-dystopia. Images of Abu Ghraib, 9/11, swine flu, the BP Gulf oil spill and the economic crisis composed our new contemporary sublime."

Amongst Grimonprez's influences are Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Don DeLillo.

Soundtrack to a coup d'état is about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination.

It is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in glove with the military-industrial complex to smother this very dream.

He is most known for his films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) which the Guardian included in its article From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works, Double Take (2009) and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), based on the book by Andrew Feinstein.

Grimonprez is currently developing "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT" about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination.

The film is based on Andrew Feinstein's book "The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade" (2011).

Feinstein's book exposes the "parallel world of money, corruption, deceit and death" behind the trade in arms.

Key interviews include: Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges, Michael Hardt, Noam Chomsky among others.

Grimonprez claims that "the contemporary condition of what it is to be human calls into question the relevance of politics and reality, one that has collapsed under the weight of an information overload and mass deception."

To him the present political debate "has schrunk into mere fear management and paranoia suddenly seems the only sensible state of being, where it is easier to ponder the end of the world than to imagine viable political alternatives. "Shying away from getting stuck into merely critiquing social evil, I began exploring alternatives.

It's indeed important to say what we don't want, but more crucial is to point at what we actually do want." According to Grimonprez, the film not only exposes how corruption drives the global arms trade, while it often sets the stage for war, it hopes to offer also alternatives to the paradigm of greed, celebrated by social darwinism.

In her article When Big Screens Meet Small Screens: Deferred Homecoming in Johan Grimonprez's Shadow World Sabine Hillen writes: Shadow World, with its sources, editing and discursive confrontations, opens up contradictory questions.

In this sense, the notion of home is everything except an easily readable arena.

The pleasure of a nostalgic narrative on television recalling the past is balanced by means of a historical counter-narrative.