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The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgian overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.

The location is the town of El Paris. When ten-year-old boy Quasimodo shows signs of deformity, his well-to-do parents place him in the charge of the town’s mysterious evangelist, Frollo. In exchange, they adopt a Cuban girl, Esméralda, from a lower social class. Ten years later, El Paris is menaced by a serial killer, and Quasimodo is the prime suspect.

If he buys a gun, visits his wife's lover, and ends up savagely biting his dentist, Samuel Polaris is in bad shape. Very bad. Unless the others, the “normal” people – with their career plans, their adulteries, their arrogant incompetence – have fallen into a sort of collective madness. Who knows. Because he has no choice, because he is in love with his wife and because he refuses to resign himself to the worst, Samuel Polaris decides to regain his dignity. Even if, to do this, he has to steal from his psychiatrist the watch that Kennedy was wearing the day he was assassinated.

A young boy and his two grandmothers flee from headhunters and other villainous types in the Brazilian rain forest in this wacky family adventure. Benjamin, whose mom is dead and whose dad is off in the jungle searching for gold, is more cool-headed than his two grandmothers, both of whom hate one another. Upper class teacher bristles at the coarse behavior of working class Suzanne, who shoplifts and cheats at cards. Soon bad guys threaten them, and the chase begins.