Investigating revolutionary Patrice Lumumba’s brief tenure as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the machinations behind his shocking assassination, legendary Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck discovers critical flashpoints where a nation’s officially curated narratives intersect with repressed truths. At eight years-old Peck was brought by his family to the newly independent DRC, where his father worked for the United Nations as an agricultural professor and his mother served as secretary to the mayor of Kinshasa. Sifting through his childhood recollections and interviewing Belgian journalists and politicians who witnessed the country’s descent into internecine violence, Peck fashions a prismatic meditation on the elusiveness of political objectivity and the ethics of personal remembrance in chronicling the traumas of history.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata/L’Image Retrouvée in collaboration with Velvet Film and supervised by Raoul Peck.

Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.