| Lumumba:
la mort du prophete (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet)
Lumumba: la mort du Prophete offers a unique opportunity to reconsider the life and legacy of one of the legendary figures of modern African history. Like Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba is remembered less for his lasting achievements than as an enduring symbol of the struggle for self-determination. This deeply personal reflection by acclaimed fimmaker Raoul Peck on the events of Lumumba's brief twelve month rise and fall is a moving memorial to a man described as a giant, a prophet, a devil, "a mystic of freedom," and "the Elvis Presley of African politics." If Lumumba is a film about remembering, it is even more a film about forgetting. It is not so much a conventional biography as a study of how Lumumba's legacy has been manipulated by politicians, the media and time itself. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck meditates on his own memories as the privileged son of an agricultural expert working for the regime which displaced Lumumba. He examines home movies, photographs, old newsreels and contemporary interviews with Belgian journalists and Lumumba's own daughter to try to piece together the tragic events and betrayals of 1960. A film essay in
the tradition of Night and Fog or The Sorrow and the Pity,
Lumumba explores how any image inevitably represses the multiple
stories surrounding it, how the past as preserved by the media is always
in a sense the hostage of history's winners. Therefore present-day Europe
figures as prominently in Lumumba as the Congo in 1960, because
Europe was the unseen hand behind the camera and the events leading
to Lumumba's assassination. Peck presents an unfamiliar Europe seen
through the eyes of a visitor from the Third World - cold, affluent,
a guilty present trying to forget its past. Yet, as this film testifies,
Lumumba's prophecy will not be silenced until Africa achieves its second
independence where the promises of the first can be fulfilled.
|
"Lumumba triumphs
on two levels; as a pungent exploration of a nightmarish epoch in modern
Africa and a cogent comment on the very activity of sifting through
the past." "An incredibly
sensitive deconstruction of Patrice Lumumba and post-colonial Africa." "Succeeds admirably
as a meditation on Lumumba and his times and on the promise of African
independence thirty years later." Director: Raoul
Peck
Video Purchase: $195 To
Arrange a Speaking Engagement with Filmmaker Raoul Peck, contact BlackFilmMakers.net |
Please
Note: Raoul Peck's new feature film on Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba,
is being shown in movie theaters across the country (visit 
