When We Were Kings

Leon Gast went to Zaire in 1974 to film Zaire 74, the music festival meant to accompany the Ali-Foreman fight. When Foreman was injured in training the bout was postponed for weeks, and Gast ended up with something he had not planned for: footage of Ali's long wait in Africa. What resulted was not a film about the festival but about the man. Finishing it took more than twenty years. There was plenty of material and no money; rights problems and editing consumed years. Gast completed it only in 1996, and it won the Oscar for Best Documentary. The film's power lies not in the fight but in Ali talking. His relationship with the crowd, the way every sentence he says to camera is simultaneously a joke and a threat, and a thirty-two-year-old widely expected to lose constructing his own myth in real time. The outcome everyone knows, on 30 October 1974, arrives after all that preparation. Who it is for: viewers interested in boxing history, in Ali, and in seventies Black culture. Who it is not for: anyone wanting technical analysis of the fight, since the film is about personality rather than combat.