Customer Reviews

Lumumba (Original French Language)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

LUMUMBA is the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power in the Congo in 1960 when revolution kicked the colonial power (Beligium, etc.) out. Here's the reason to see it: Africans speaking the truth about colonialism, African men dealing with the complexities of being a brand new government, seeing powerful revolutionaries having to make choices about how or whether to compromise. Seeing it makes you realize how we never see pictures that show Black people in charge, as competent, complex leaders, etc. So much of what we see is cartoons and caracatures. It also includes tenderness of Black family love.

It is also a very difficult film to watch: it is full of violence, not the gratuitous kind. It doesn't give women enough of a voice and I forgive it this point for all the other things it does.

Though LUMUMBA is not a "feel good" movie, it is inspiring, because I feel compelled to figure out how you could out-organize the forces who worked against Lumumba's fight for independence and unity. And because you see the potential of their vision, if only for moments, it reinspires to work towards that end. And it moves me as any well-executed martyr's story: we must carry on the work.

[P.S. DO NOT see the HBO butchered & English-Dubbed version on this film. They chopped the best parts of the movie out, and in general, ruined a fine film. I have to wonder... was it intentional?]

I enjoyed this movie very much. Accoring to most available literature, this movie is historically accurate. Peck is a well respected director and seems to have done a good job presenting the truth. Lumumba is an icon in African history and he represents the hope and optimism of post-colonial Africa. His death was a tragedy and it leads us to wonder "What if...". This is an important chapter in modern African history and we are lucky that such a well-made movie has helped tell this story to the world.

PS. Frank Carlucci's (the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa at the time) name is bleeped out in some versions because his lawyers pressured the film's distributors to remove all reference to him. He of course denies involvement in the assassination of Lumumba. Peck has stated that he has strong reason to believe his movie to be accurate.

I highly recommend seeing this movie. I read the NY Review of Books' article on Lumumba first, which gives a good sense of the historical forces. The former UN Undersecretary however is unrelenting as far as Lumumba is concerned, painting Lumumba almost as a psychotic unrelenting fanatic. It appears the Undersecretary's bias stems from his frustration felt by many UN leaders at the time in dealing with a distrusting world leader (ie., Lumumba) wanting to play on his own terms. Peck on the other hand shows Lumumba's idealism, integrity, fears, and demand for equal recognition clashing with the designs of the West and the riotous factions within his own country. The movie is much more sympathetic and realistic in portraying what Lumumba was up against. The audience really feels and relates to Lumumba in a way that is not at all schmaltzy. I highly recommend this film.

I would recommend this film, but couched in the warning that I found it a bit hard to follow. There are a lot of characters - the various political figures - and sometimes it's hard to keep them all straight. It's definitely important subject matter though - an interesting glimpse into the colonial forces that shaped modern Africa and the struggles that continue today in many of its troubled nations.

Despite what it says in the Amazon.com advertisement, this DVD is NOT the full 180-minute version of "Lumumba." In fact, at 109 minutes, this version is actually six minutes shorter than the "Special Edition," (also Region 1), that is listed at 115 minutes. The sleeve for this version also claims to have an English-language soundtrack, but it does not. It does have English-language subtitles to go with the French soundtrack, however. The sleeve for this version claims that it its aspect ration is 1:2.35, but that does not appear to be true, either--the aspect ratio appears to be 1:1.85, the same as the Special Edition. Because the Special Edition contains many extras--including excepts from R. Peck's excellent documentary "Lumumba: Death of a Prophet," it is clearly the better choice for anyone who wants to purchase a DVD of this film right now. Ideally, however, we should press for a release of the full 3-hour version of this film, preferably packaged together with the FULL documentary "Lumumba: Death of a Prophet." Now THAT would be a package worth paying extra for! The 2 stars above reflect the several misrepresentations associated with this particular DVD release, not the film itself, which is very good, albeit in this version in an unnecessarily truncated form.

Lumumba is a movie worth seeing. It sets down as facts, a number of attributes about the character Lumumba, in terms of substance and style.
In a very striking story such as this, a very important and incredibly difficult task has to do with revealing raw facts while avoiding any elements of assessment or judgement of such facts by the crafters of the film. This allows the audience to do their own assessment of the raw facts they see. The events in the movie is presented from the perspective of Lumumba. We hear Lumumba's voice at the beginning and end of the movie, as well as a voice-over narration from time to time. This idea of the "Voice of the Dead" is interesting. In the story, Patrice, being human, didn't know (of course) what others were thinking and conspiring about. He had to read between the lines and put the pieces together. That is what one feels when watching events unfold from Lumumba's perspective. I very often felt an underlying silent tone of events, which made me think curiously and read between the lines. So in reacting to Soren Dayton's comment, I have to say that it is not a misstep even though the film does not outrightly present us with a glaring reason why Mobutu changes in the story.
In terms of production, continuity and editing of the film could have been better. However, Lumumba is an excellent attempt.

This movie is an excellent in its depiction of Mr. Lumumba. Strong, sensitive and committed to his people this movie depicted a strong man senselessly murdered after betrayal by his own countrymen. Mr. Ebouaney's performance was Oscar worthy! This is a must see movie.