one day history will have its say

Anyone who has read King Leopold's Ghost needs to see Raoul Peck's 2000 film Lumumba, which dramatizes the life and horrifying death of the first prime minister of Congo after that country gained independence from Belgium in 1960.  Peck does not glamorize Patrice Lumumba, and the brilliant French actor Eriq Ebouaney instead plays him as a complex leader who was a powerful orator but also a perfectionist whose stubbornness proved a liability to his country in the volatile period following independence.  Lumumba lasted mere months in office before he was assassinated, and Peck leaps backwards and forwards in time to illustrate Lumumba's meteoric rise and fall at a dizzying pace that takes the viewer along for the ride, mirroring too the extreme instability in Congo's government that is the country's legacy to this day.  Lumumba is the rare biopic that trusts the intelligence of its audience, and I appreciated that Peck's intention was to capture something of the personality of his main character and not to simply spoon out dry historical facts.  However, the movie sure did inspire me to run to Wikipedia afterward to do some further reading.