Pure Nonfiction: Inside Documentary Film 133: Remembering Leon Gast & “When We Were Kings”
“When We Were Kings” director Leon King died on March 8 at age 84. He took over twenty years to make his Oscar-winning documentary about the boxers Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman, filmed in Zaire in 1974 and completed in 1996.
Further links:
New York Times obituary on Leon Gast
Leon Gast on the making of his first film “Our Latin Thing”
Pure Nonfiction episode 15: Muhammad Ali on Film
The New Yorker on William Greaves’ "The Fight"
This episode's closing narration refers to the reckoning over documenting BIPOC stories. For more, read Sonya Childress & Natalie Bullock Brown in Documentary and Stanley Nelson in the Los Angeles Times.
Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers explores the story of Leon's perseverance in interviews with his wife Geri Spolan-Gast, producer David Sonenberg, editor Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte and filmmaker Barbara Kopple.