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."