The documentary film “Lumumba, the return of a hero” will be screened in preview Thursday, June 8 at the Vendôme cinema in the municipality of Ixelles in Belgium. This production directed by Benoît Feyt, Dieudo Hamadi and Quentin Noirfalisse, lasting one hour and 26 minutes, is an immersion in the political celebrations of the departure of the remains of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Belgium.
Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo and an independence hero who fought against Belgian colonialism. He was assassinated with two of his close collaborators in the middle of the Cold War and during the wave of African independence. Unfortunately, his body was dissolved in acid by a Belgian policeman named Gérard Soete, who notably removed the only tooth that survived.
In 2016, it was revealed that human remains had been secretly kept in Belgium. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and that of his collaborators went unpunished, although a few years later a parliamentary commission of inquiry concluded that the Belgian government had deliberately spread lies about the circumstances of his death.
The documentary film “Lumumba, the return of a hero” offers an immersion in the political celebrations of the hero’s return to Congo and Belgium, but above all seeks to know what remains of him in these two countries. A year after the official ceremony organized in Belgium in honor of the Congolese hero of independence, Patrice Lumumba returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo, or rather the Congo returns to the Congo, as one of his children says.
In addition to the screening of the film, a meeting will be organized with the directors to discuss the subject on which they have worked