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Soul Power

BAFICI 2009
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Info
Year:

2008
Original Title:

Soul Power
País:

Estados Unidos 
Director:

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

Color:

Color
Format:

35 mm
Duration:

93 min
Cast:
  • James Brown, Muhammad Ali, B.B. King
Production:
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles
  • MONTAJE: David Smith
  • PRODUCCIÓN: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, David Sonenberg, Leon Gast

Synopsis

To unearth is the key verb for documentaries that make history. In Soul Power, however, the footage shot in Zaire in 1974 and reorganized by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, doesn't expect to shed light on any other truth than how it was possible for the great geniuses of rhythm & blues and soul to gather there while the famous fight of the century between Ali and Foreman was taking place. In the origins of Soul Power is precisely Leon Gast's 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, about that mythical fight, recovering the lost reels but updating them with current testimonies by those who were present. Levy-Hinte, who worked in the editing of that documentary, takes on another path, choosing to let those three tremendous, feverish, energizing days provide the complex situations of its editing, and showing the fascination it caused in James Brown, B. B. King or The Spinners to be able to play in the midst of such a political volcano. In Soul Power, music succeeds in refracting a thousand aspects of the world and people, because even if everything happened 35 years ago, the documentary is so new and modern that time seems like an accident. The soul is always soul.