He's a lover and a fighter: Kassim Ouma reflects on his violent past in Kassim the Dream

It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in his pockets, and a smile on his face that makes you like him before you know anything about him.

But don’t look for Kief Davidson’s slick, gorgeously photographed, and almost hypnotically absorbing Kassim the Dream to get the studio remake treatment without major script changes. Growing up in Uganda, Ouma was six years old when he was drafted — kidnapped — into the National Resistance Army. By eight, he was a killer and worse, committing atrocities far beyond any Western sense of what constitutes a soldier’s duty: Not just killing in combat, but the torture and wholesale murder of defenseless noncombatants. He has nightmares about it, he tells us in the doc’s opening moments, which would seem to be a far gentler penance than someone who has done what he’s done deserves. And yet, how can you judge him? He was a child, doing what the adults and the other kids around him were doing, and dulling whatever pangs his still-developing conscience gave him with marijuana.

And boxing.

In 1998, when he was 19, he used the visa he’d been granted to travel with the Ugandan military boxing team to flee to the United States. “Boxing gym” were two of the only English words he knew, but they were enough to get him to the Alexandria Boxing Club, were the management kindly let him train (and sleep under the ring, though they didn’t know it at the time) despite the fact that he was a broke stranger with whom they could barely communicate.

Kassim the Dream covers Ouma’s informal adoption by Tom Moran, the Teddy Bear-ish family man and political artist who becomes his manager; his fast rise and eventual stagnation as a pro fighter; and his return visit to Uganda following a long campaign to be pardoned for his desertion, for which the usual penalty is death. (When the Ugandan ambassador cites the story of the prodigal son from the Bible while lecturing Ouma for walking out on his “duty” to torture and murder when so ordered, it’s perhaps the most stomach-turning scene in a film not lacking for gruesome imagery.) Finally winning a pardon, he visits the grave of his father, beaten to death by soldiers in retribution for Ouma’s desertion. He collapses on top his tombstone, his body wracked with sobs.

Director/producer Davison also captures Ouma’s immaturity in his 20s, once he’s had a taste of the good life. He parties when he’s supposed to be in training, getting baked on his way to the gym for crying out loud. His lack of discipline eventually costs him in the ring, a 2006 defeat by Jermain Taylor beginning a losing streak that he still hasn’t managed to reverse. He also refers to Ugandan President Yoweri Mseventi as “my nigga” in a press conference for the Ugandan media. Hilarious, yes, but just a bit impolitic. That’s the contradiction of Ouma’s character: Denied anything like a childhood between the ages of six and 19, he’s had to get his clowning around out of his system in his 20s -- only now, he's actually got something to lose.

Despite its abundance of dark material, the doc still ultimately feels hopeful, powered by Ouma’s unflappable optimism despite having done and witnessed things that anyone who hasn’t done time in a war zone can barely contemplate. His is a remarkable story, and Davidson has done an equally remarkable job of capturing it in all its complexity and strangeness and redemption.

Kassim the Dream screens tonight at 10:15 p.m. and Sunday at 5:15 p.m. at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channal Documentary Festival.