Lumumba

The film’s heady 2½ hours are as thick with detail as a graduate seminar yet bustle like a TikTok video, a deft and nearly breathless archival exposé that centers on the January 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, less than a year after he was elected leader of the newly formed Democratic Republic of the Congo, at last independent from Belgium’s colonial rule.

Security Council in the wake of Lumumba’s assassination.

In the 1950s and 60s, her mother, the late Andrée Blouin, threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, mobilising the Democratic Republic of Congo's women against colonialism and rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, DR Congo's first prime minister and a revered independence hero.

Within seven months of Lumumba taking charge, army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu seized power.

She attracted even more attention when she met Lumumba.