On January 23, Maison Française hosted a screening of the documentary film Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.

On Thursday night, a collection of francophiles assembled at the Maison Française to watch Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1991). The francophone documentary covers the tragic 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, who served as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The film was critically acclaimed and was shown at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

Lumumba: Death of a Prophet is part documentary, part memoir. Peck grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the period of political turmoil following Lumumba’s assassination; the film narrates both the historical events and Peck’s own childhood experiences. In doing so, it contemplates the opaque circumstances of Lumumba’s death and the Congo’s lingering trauma.

The film opens with moody, richly colored shots of Brussels, overlaid by Peck’s rather enigmatic monologue. Over footage of glowing street lamps, Peck utters, “C’était un géant, Maman, qui dans la nuit tomba” [It was a giant, Mother, who fell that night]. Soon, there appears silent black-and-white archival footage and photographs of Patrice Lumumba. Across the film’s one-hour runtime, Peck oscillates between recounting his reflections and citing historical facts, interspersing recorded interviews with journalists and politicians who witnessed the crisis. Peck’s narration continually offers foreboding commentary. At one point, he zooms in on Lumumba photographed at the June 1960 independence ceremony for the Congo, at which the politician delivered an impromptu speech criticizing the Belgian regime; Peck observes, “Il va dire ce qu’il ne faut pas dire” [He is about to say what shouldn’t be said].

The film’s anti-colonial sentiment is unmistakable. Shifting between beautiful aesthetic shots of Brussels and sober archival footage, the film underlines the disparity between Belgium’s prosperity and the Congo’s enduring hardship. One shot depicts a metal effigy of Tintin, the Belgian comic icon, rotating atop a building in Brussels; minutes later, another shot presents photographs of the brutalities inflicted on the Congolese by the Belgian state.

Although Lumumba: Death of a Prophet is overwhelmingly somber in tone, it spurred a few moments of laughter from our audience. The film features an interview with Serge Michel, Lumumba’s former presse attaché [secretary], who noted the irony of ill-informed Western journalists reporting on the Congo’s political situation—to a journalist asking for background material, Michel recalled suggesting “Anthology of Surrealism” by Maurice Nadeau.

The film’s most poignant scene exhibits footage of Lumumba’s capture by state authorities, who will soon lead him to his death. Lumumba’s wife and child stare in consternation as the politician is roughly arrested; Lumumba himself remains strikingly austere. As Peck later remarks, “Tout passe, les images restent” [All passes, images remain]. In the film’s final minutes, footage rolls of Belgian elites socializing at a sparkling evening gala while Peck solemnly narrates the details of Lumumba’s murder.

As the credits rolled, our crowd silently shuffled out of Maison Française and dispersed into the dark January evening. Though subdued by the bleakness of the film, I was glad to have viewed it; I learned more about a historical subject I knew little about, all while practicing my French comprehension. I encourage all Columbia students, francophone or not, to try attending a Maison Française film screening, if only to expand their cultural horizons. Among the event’s four dozen attendees, I could discern only a handful of undergraduate students. Maison Française’s screenings do include English subtitles—but I would recommend getting a seat in the front, or else the first few words of every sentence might be obscured by an audience member’s head. Perhaps, however, my fragmented view of the screen was fitting for a film that sifts through discordant memories, records, and testimonies in attempts to decipher an inscrutable past.

Film via The Criterion Channel