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.