Lumumba: Death of a Prophet

Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the Congo after independence. He held office for less than three months and was killed in 1961. The documentary takes up that death and the political calculation behind it. Raoul Peck does not do it as a straight telling of history. He brings his own childhood into the account; his family had gone to the Congo in those years. The film sets footage shot in Brussels beside archive material. So the place the story is told from is separated from the place it happened. The account also asks how memory and news images are put together. Peck’s sixty nine minute film, a coproduction of four countries, was completed in 1991.