Stories of Pelf and Plunder: On the DRC and Palestine Documentaries that Went to the Oscars

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat was one of the two documentaries that gripped my attention at the recent Hollywood awards fest. It brought back memories of journeying in a ramshackle motorboat, low on fuel to darkly lit villages along the crocodile infested Congo river. It was a dire UNICEF mission on behalf of some of the most inaccessible women and children in urgent need of succour. The meandering bends of the river had triggered random, seemingly unconnected thoughts. There was one about Kurtz, I remember, the ivory merchant in the Belgian Congo portrayed by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness as the epitome of the darkness and brutality of colonialism.  

Made by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat won nomination but did not get the award.

The documentary is an eye-opener that puts together the CIA staged assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the left-leaning independence leader, and the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He was murdered, his body dismembered and dissolved in acid to destroy the evidence of the crime and with it everything that he stood for. The intelligence agencies of the US and Belgium plotted the assassination with the support of the two governments, the documentary affirms with clips of old news reels and interviews of some in the know. The conduits included the mining conglomerates, and the plot involved the services of American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong. They were manipulated for the ‘soft power’ of their music over Africa. The film is a reminder that the colonial pelf and plunder of Congo’s natural resources symbolised by the Belgian Mr. Kurz continues unabated under today’s neocolonial imperialism. The character of Kurtz would form the basis for Marlon Brando’s role with the same name in Apocalypse Now.

The other film that grabbed me won the Oscar – No Other Land, a portrayal of the Palestinian ordeal under Israeli inhuman occupation. It was a surprise win after every attempt was made by Israeli lobbyists to quash its making and after distributers in the US refused to come forward to show it in their movie halls.

A Palestinian journalist from the West Bank and an Israeli Jewish investigative journalist from Jerusalem joined hands to describe the searing reality of life under the occupation of a people whose lives too were once cruelly disrupted by a racist state. The documentary took me to my days at JNU with Palestinian students on Delhi’s streets protesting against their betrayal by fellow Arab states who continue to collude with Zionism paying the Palestinians a grudging lip service.

Though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and No Other Land have different themes and unfold on different continents, the theft of resources of the occupied lands and the dispossession of its people is a common thread that connects them irrevocably.

No Other Land’s straightforward message of love, inclusiveness, and tolerance underscored a team that worked like a bridge of friendship between two hostile camps. It haunts the conscience with its simplicity. It focuses on the life of an ordinary Palestinian family over a five-year period in the village of Masafar Yatta in the West Bank. The sensitive portrayal of the family’s struggle for survival reveals an amazing dignity amid home demolitions by Israeli troops.