Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Kassim the Dream"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The central figure of the ESPN documentary Kassim the Dream, directed by Kief Davidson (who co-directed The Devil's Miner), is a light middleweight boxer, Kassim Ouma, who was born in Uganda in 1978 and forced into army service when he was six years old. At eighteen, he escaped and made his way to the United States, where he discovered a gym ans started honing the skills he had developed on the army boxing team, as well as picking up the skills he'd need to get by in America--his new buddies at the gym didn't find out that he was homeless until he'd mastered enough of the English language to tell them. Like some of the other documentaries that ESPN lugged to the festival, it's a movie about a clash of cultures. When Kassim, who has one small son in Uganda and another smaller one in the States, holds the toddler in his arms and asks him, "Are you a Ugandan baby or an American baby?", the kid seems to answer by sticking his Mickey Mouse doll in the camera lens.

Kassim the Dream is fascinating because Kassim himself is fascinating. For most of the film he maintains the open, smiling demeanor of a big, happy kid. (He's no less transparent when he's not so happy. After a long day's workout, his trainer says, "I love it now when Kassim comes by and gives me the mean face," and sure enough, the tired fighter stalks past the camera pouting like someone stole his lollipop.) At one point, he refers in passing to having tortured people when he was a child soldier, adding only that of course it makes sense that if you give a child a weapon and power over others and force him to engage in combat, he's going to enjoy torturing people. What he says is less remarkable than the fact that he's unembarrassed to say it--not because he doesn't show remorse but because he trusts the listeners to extend some understanding to what he must have gone through. His youthful experience seems to have made Kassim someone who lives totally in the moment, which, properly controlled, could be the key to being a good fighter but also can be a disability outside the ring; his manager makes no secret of thinking that Kassim has lost some fights, and the championship belt he won in 2004, because he doesn't know how to turn off the party machine that is always threatening to pick up steam around him. In the last section of the film, he finally manages to make it home to Uganda, after a long process of negotiations with the Ugandan government. (As an army deserter, he had been facing a possible death sentence.) There's a stunning sequence in which he goes from expressing gratitude at being let back into the country to a frenzy of panic in the car as he begins to fantasize that he might not be allowed to leave to even deeper gratitude to the army official who greets him and assures him that there are no hard feelings. Not long after that, he's prostate at the grave of his father (who, we're told, was beaten to death as a reprisal for Kassim's desertion) and declaring that Uganda is his true home and he 's going to stay. But he seems unlikely to entirely get America out of his system: he makes the papers by trying to show his support for Ugandan President Museveni by calling him "my nigga."

Soldier of Orangeburg

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Two years from now, America will mark the anniversary of the shooting of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen. It was a pivotal moment in the anti-war movement, and it marked, for many, the exact point at which it was no longer possible to pretend what kind of country they lived in. There will be a lot of nostalgia, a lot of hand-wringing, and if we're lucky, a certain degree of self-examination. What probably won't be discussed quite as much, if at all, is the fact that it wasn't the first killing of students on campus by members of the armed forces.

That dubious distinction belongs to the so-called "Orangeburg Massacre", where, in 1968, National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of 100 students at South Carolina State College. Three of the students were killed, and dozens were wounded; today, two separate films -- one, Orangeburg, by a pair of independent documentarians, set to debut on PBS this fall, and the other, Black Magic, by a more mainstream filmmaker, airing on ESPN of all places -- ask why America's memory of this outrage doesn't echo the way Kent State did. There are plenty of good reasons, of course: the SC State shooting wasn't as well documented (only a few photographs were taken at the time, and most were destroyed in a fire); it fell during an off news cycle and wasn't picked up by the major newspapers until it had largely died down; initial reports of the massacre falsely described it as an exchange of gunfire, rather than the shooting of unarmed students by soldiers; and it happened at night, when no television crews were available to cover the event.

But the biggest reason of all is that the victims were all black. The shooting was triggered by protests in reaction to white citizens who objected to the desegregation of a local bowling alley, and instead of being a response to the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre was part of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.

In the New York Times, the fascinating story of how these films came to be made is laid out in some detail (director Dan Klores explains that he essentially used the fact that one of the victims of Orangeburg was a star basketball player in high school to convince ESPN to fund his movie), and the ongoing injustice of the story (the only person who served jail time for the killings was one of the victims, who was charged with incidement to riot) is addressed by both filmmakers, who hope that, if nothing else, the new attention the case is getting will force the government of South Carolina to reopen the case. The Times also provides links to its own contemporary coverage of the case, and some compelling commentary from the people who have been pursuing justice in the case for decades. Bestor Cram, the co-producer of Orangeburg, explains his difficulties in securing finance for the documentary: "We were up against two problems. People actually wondered why they hadn't heard of (the massacre). Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told."

The Screengrab : espn

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Kassim the Dream"

Soldier of Orangeburg