Assassination in the colonial style

'Thomas Giefer succeeds, most convincingly, to decipher and to uncover the stories behind the 'official stories' surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Giefer goes back to archival material, which he chooses excellently and which he complements with interviews with time-witnesses and relatives who deliver powerful statements. The result is a documentary, which is rich in knowledge and is an exciting polit-thriller. Because the author does not play only masterfully on the keyboard of the historical guaranteed facts, he does not try to avoid the emotional aspects of his brutal conspiracy of murder. So - besides the statements of Lumumba's children - the astonishing frank memories of the wire-puller of the murderous conspiracy, the former Belgian policeman Gérard Soete, in his nice little house in Brugge, of how the victim was treated after his execution and how - not without pride - he shows the broken out tooth of Lumumba, gives the audience an impression of the barbaric monstrosity of the murderers. That none of them have been called to account until today, seems to be convenient. Giefer's film is like an investigative requeim, a melancholic chronical about the last days of Lumumba, told by those men who committed the murder. Today one is astonished, how precisely all this matches to each other, but how openly all the people who took part directly in it, today report about it without any feeling. Giefer contrasts the culprits of then with Lumumba's children of today, with piano tunes in a sad moll and melancholic collages of film documents.