Saturday, 14 February 2026 at 7 pm
Lumumba: La mort du prophète / Director: Raoul Peck / DR Congo, France, Germany, Switzerland / 1991 / 69’
Patrice Lumumba - a key figure in the struggle for decolonization and the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of Congo - remains a global symbol of resistance and liberation. In Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, Raoul Peck offers a deeply personal and essayistic reflection on Lumumba’s meteoric rise and tragic fall over the course of just twelve months. The film stands as both an intimate meditation and a tribute to a man variously described as a genius, a prophet, an enemy, a “mystic of freedom,” and even “the Elvis Presley of African politics.”
If Lumumba: Death of a Prophet is a film about memory, it is even more a film about forgetting. Instead of a conventional biography, Peck demonstrates how Lumumba's legacy has been manipulated by politicians, the media, and time itself. He searches through home movies, photographs, old film magazines, and contemporary interviews with Belgian journalists and Lumumba's own daughter in an attempt to connect the tragic events and betrayals of 1960. In the tradition of essay films such as Night and Fog and The Sorrow and the Mercy, the film Lumumba: Death of a Prophet reflects on the instability of historical images and narratives, suggesting that the past is never fixed, but continually reinterpreted - often in favour of those who hold power.
The screening and discussion take place on the 65th anniversary of the Zagreb protest held in response to Lumumba’s assassination in 1961, underscoring the strong resonance of global political events within the local context.
Participants in the discussion:
Georges Senga is a Congolese photographer who currently lives and works in the Netherlands. His photographic practice focuses on exploring history and narrative, as well as memory and identity, within the context of the postcolonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work often engages with the legacy of Patrice Lumumba, notably in one of his key projects, Une vie après la mort (Life After Death) from 2012. This series of fourteen diptychs explores an alternative history of Congo, imagining what life might have been like had Lumumba not been assassinated in 1961.
Lucija Mulalić is an activist who has been providing direct support to migrant communities for more than ten years. Over the past two years, together with Emina Bužinkić, she has been developing and leading a thematic series of dialogue meetings titled Transnational Solidarity at MaMa Club. She graduated from the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb and went on to study Mediation, Conflict and Peace Studies, at the University of Tampere in Finland, where she focused in particular on Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial movements during the decolonization of the African continent.
Saša Šimpraga is a publicist and activist. He has written several books about Zagreb and is the initiator of the Patrice Lumumba Street project. The aim of this project is to contribute, through various formats, to restoring the figure and work of Lumumba to the collective memory of a city, society, and culture that once honoured him by naming a street after him.