Product Description

Made in the tradition of such true-life political thrillers as MALCOLM X and JFK, Raoul Peck's award-winning LUMUMBA is a gripping epic that dramatizes for the first time the rise and fall of legendary African leader Patrice Lumumba. When the Congo declared its independence from Belgium in 1960, the 36-year-old, self-educated Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent state. Called "the politico of the bush" by journalists of the day, he became a lightning rod of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him powerful enemies in Belgium and the U.S. Lumumba would last just months in office before being brutally assassinated. Strikingly photographed in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Belgium as civil war once again raged in the Congo, the film vividly re-creates the shocking events behind the birth of the country that became Zaire during the reign of Lumumba's former friend and eventual nemesis, Joseph Mobutu. This is the English-dubbed version of the film.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43780 in DVD
• Brand: DUB
• Released on: 2002-11-05
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, Dubbed, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French, Lingala
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 115 minutes

From The New Yorker
Raoul Peck tells the story of the African freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba with fire and grace. The opening scene sets the vérité tone with the sound of a saw cutting through bone; two Belgian soldiers are breaking down Lumumba's body and incinerating it in a ten-gallon drum. From there, the film backtracks to the origins of the Congolese independence movement and proceeds to explain how a man's legacy could be considered so threatening. Peck handles all of this, including the atrocities, with refinement, and lets the drama of Lumumba's story run smoothly, free of heavy historical detail. Eriq Ebouaney is extraordinary in the lead role, the production feels emotionally true, and the speeches generate spontaneous applause. Only the ending comes off as too hopeful, as we know that with Lumumba's death, the regime of Mobuto began. In French and Lingala. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Get the subtitled Special Edition version
First off, Lumumba is an exciting, dramatic film that I recommend very highly.
However, this version of the DVD in addition to being dubbed into English, is censored in at least one place. Toward the end, at a moment crucial to a historical understanding of the role of other countries (including the U.S.) in sealing Lumumba's fate, the name of the United States official is actually beeped out on the soundtrack. Why? Did it have something to do with this being the version aired on HBO?
Of course, it's possible that there are other instances of censorship on this DVD that I'm unaware of.
I'd recommend getting the subtitled Special Edition. The price isn't THAT much more and it has some good special features that make the higher price worth it.

Born fifty years too early - the life of Patrice Lumumba
"Lumumba" is a masterful depiction of the politically rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. The film is gripping in its portrayal of those in the political forefront of the newly independent nation of Congo, most notably Lumumba himself. The film's strength is its use of historically accurate factual analysis, which, incidentally, does not always glorify Lumumba. The viewer comes away from this film shaken to the core by the utter sense of humanity that the brilliance of Raoul Peck achieves in this vivid portrait of the fallen leader. This film is a "must see" for history buffs as well as for those who continue to seek examples of what moral leadership really looks like.

Charismatic leader self-sacrificed to an impossible mission
A very well-made historical film with superb casting and acting. Leaves you with a bad feeling at the bottom of your stomach.

[See Soren Dayton's comments.] The film covers the last 8 months of Lumumba's life, in 1960, beginning in prison, continuing with four months' freedom and ending in four month's internment, flight, torture and execution. It centers on the emotional aspects of life at the center of the storm. It shows but does not analyze.

The Belgian Congo was constituted 80 years before through the most extensive use of barbarism then known in the European conquest of Africa. 80 years down the road, Congo's function as a state was primarily the extraction and shipping of mineral wealth and agricultural produce from Africa's richest region (the region drained by the Congo river), with the necessary modicum of services to the people doing the extraction and crop-raising, the blacks.

Lumumba accepted the existence of the Congo state, and postulated a Congolese nation. The state only existed as a machine for exploiting the underground riches and the labor of the "nation", and the nation existed only as defined within that state. It had no common culture, no common language, no common tradition (except Bantu tradition generally) and especially no common structure save that defined by the Belgian-run state.

The task Lumumba defined for himself was squaring the circle. The only way the Congo could be maintained as a state was as it had always existed, through massive violence and systematic inequality, and for the profit of the same class of profiteers as before. The Congo never had any other purpose.

Lumumba believed in his impossible task in part because he felt responsible for, and in a sense shared, the enthusiasm his Licoln-like honesty and courage generated everywhere (in Europe as well as the Congo).

In hindsight what followed, or some variant of it, was totally foreseeable, written in the structure of the state. It is interesting to see how Lumumba's honest friend, Mobutu, comes, one step at a time, to recognize this and to make his peace with it. The last scene, on the June-61 first anniversary of the country, focusses on Mobutu, who is physically the Mobutu we saw take these steps one at a time, but spiritually already the slave of the powers he made his pact with, and for which he will later take the other steps that made him in his time one of Africa's most nauseating dictators.

If the machine left in place by the Belgians and the Western mining industry had not produced Mobutu, it would have produced a clone of him. Lumumba was a human sacrifice to African hopes the machine had no truck with. These hopes were worse than self-defeating the moment "the Congolese state and nation" was accepted as a fact.