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Juli frera
* Release Date: 2009
* Runtime: 93 min
* Genre:
* Starring: Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Celia Cruz, B.B. King ... see all
* Director: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
* Plot: A documentary on the legendary soul music concert staged in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974.
“Soul Power,” carefully constructed with outtakes from “When We Were Kings,” Leon Gast’s lauded 1996 documentary about the famous 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, risks the undeserved fate of being viewed as a mere supplement to the film for which its footage was originally intended. This would be a shame, because this new film—as “directed” by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, one of the editors of Gast’s original project—stands on its own as a vibrant verité record of Zaïre ‘74, a three-day music festival organized in tandem with the Rumble and having as much to do with bridging the worlds of African-American and African identity as did the fight and its symbolic setting.
“Black Power is sought everywhere, but it is already realized in Zaïre,” proclaims a sign featured in the film, and each moment of “Soul Power” attests to the fervent pride of the country, the performers, the organizers, and one very controversial and enthusiastic pugilist in taking part in an event created to joyously celebrate that power. As conceived by South African musician Hugh Masekela and producer Stewart Levine, Zaïre ’74 was quickly incorporated by Don King as the official lead-in to his enormously hyped boxing match, and it’s not much of a stretch to say that both events’ amalgamation of music, dance, athletics, and politics signaled an international “black culture” whose peak moment of influence and creative had more than arrived.
Performances by B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Danny “Big Black” Ray, and James Brown are shown for brief moments in “When We Were Kings,” but “Soul Power” is an out-and-out concert film, preceded by chaotic preparations for the event and featuring scenes underlining its ebullient theme of the bonds of African heritage: jam sessions breaking out among performers on the thirteen-hour flight to Zaïre, saxophonists playing among street children, and Ali’s inspired declarations of black liberation. Whereas contemporary interviews situated “When We Were Kings” in the past tense, Levy-Hinte almost entirely eschews such devices, making his film all the more infectious by entrenching it in the tense political climate of the time. Thirty-five years may have passed since Zaïre ’74, but the puissance of Ali countering a reporter’s plea for unity by angrily stating “We’re not all brothers!” or Miriam Makeba’s mocking of colonial incomprehension of “The Click Song” remains startlingly alive.
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