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      ‘Groomed’ Review: Confronting Patterns of Abuse

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      In this distressing documentary, a filmmaker confronts her own lingering trauma as she explores how perpetrators prime victims for abuse.Gwen van de Pas was a preteen swimmer in Holland when she met the man who would become her assistant swim team instructor, her caring confidante and soon after, her sexual abuser. Now a filmmaker living in San Francisco, van de Pas explores the traumatic experience in the documentary “Groomed.”The film (streaming on Discovery+), which van de Pas directed, has a strong pedagogic drive, laying out the steps perpetrators often take to “groom” victims — target, befriend and prime them — for sexual abuse. Van de Pas calls on experts, psychologists and a convicted sex offender for interviews, but the most illuminating examples come from her own story. In one harrowing sequence, she returns to her childhood bedroom to find the fawning letters her abuser wrote to her, and rereads them with an adult’s eye.As the film lays bare the intricacies of grooming, van de Pas chronicles her personal journey toward closure. In interviews, she recalls how she blocked out troubling memories for years, until the encounters began appearing in her dreams. She meditates on the meaning of justice and explores her hesitancy to report the abuse. Cathartic conversations with family members and other survivors lend comfort and clarity.Much of “Groomed” was filmed with a crew, and the subjects often appear in soft focus and cool hues. But the most affecting scenes clearly arose too suddenly for a production team. Early one morning, van de Pas calls her partner on Skype to relay upsetting news. She weeps in bed as her partner, on his way to work, sits down, stunned. The documentary is deliberate in ending on an uplifting note, but it is such intimate moments of pain that linger on.GroomedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘After the Murder of Albert Lima’ Review: Justice His Own Way

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      In this true crime documentary, a man ventures with two bounty hunters into Honduras to avenge the killing of his father. But the film struggles to fit the crime.How far would you go for justice? For the Florida native Paul Lima, the answer is to Honduras and back.In February 2000, Lima’s father, the lawyer and businessman Albert Lima, traveled to the tiny Honduran island Roatán to settle a debt. He never returned. A decade prior, Albert had given a loan of $84,000 to Martin Coleman, the father of his friend, for the family’s bakery. But when Coleman’s father died and his brothers began managing the bakery, regular loan payments stopped being made. When Albert went to the island to take control of the business, two of Martin’s brothers — Byron and Oral — savagely beat, then shot him. In the subsequent years, one of Albert’s killers has remained free, prompting his son to action.Paul decides to travel to Roatán with two bounty hunters: Art Torres and Zora Korhonen — to apprehend Oral. But their mission is far from easy. Directed by Aengus James and streaming on Crackle, “After the Murder of Albert Lima” is a darkly comedic true-crime documentary where the most exciting elements wane under it’s main subject’s overzealousness for drama.Paul’s plan to apprehend Oral is hilariously inept. Paul wants the bounty hunters to drug and kidnap Oral while armed guards surround the bar he frequents. They arrive for the mission without weapons, handcuffs, or even duct tape. For five days they use inconspicuous camera pens while James employs guerrilla filmmaking to not only gather evidence but also capture the action. But Paul’s compulsive desire often pushes him to put himself and his bounty hunters at risk.When the director matches Adam Sanborne’s propulsive score to the trio’s peril, he attaches an artificiality to their real efforts. It makes Paul’s arduous journey for closure not nearly as fulfilling as the film’s cathartic ending. And in its quest for entertainment value, this documentary loses sight of the actual grief and hurt a devastated son would feel.After the Murder of Albert LimaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Crackle. More

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      ‘Wojnarowicz’ Review: A Revolutionary Provocateur

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      A documentary on the artist David Wojnarowicz shows the ways that the rebel was a prophet, and honors him appropriately.The artist David Wojnarowicz escaped one American hellscape to find himself smack-dab in the middle of another. In a 1985 short film he made with Richard Kern, “You Killed Me First,” Wojnarowicz, then in his early 30s, portrays a version of his own alcoholic, abusive father. The grindhouse-style underground movie depicts a real event — that father feeding his children’s pet rabbit to them for dinner.Directed by Chris McKim, this exemplary documentary on the artist (which is also a mini-chronicle of the East Village art scene of 1970s and ’80s New York) takes advantage of Wojnarowicz’s penchant for self-documentation, drawing on the cassette journals he began keeping even before he was a fully formed creator. The documents Wojnarowicz maintained in this period, during which his art became inextricable from his activism, guide the viewer into the second American hellscape Wojnarowicz experienced: the AIDS epidemic.Wojnarowicz’s insistence that the Reagan administration was practically gleeful in ignoring the disease while simultaneously stigmatizing its victims provoked a number of controversies, over arts funding and more. The work he produced, often in collaboration with or under the influence of the photographer Peter Hujar, his mentor, is still bracing and fiercely clear-eyed on political and moral issues that persist to this day. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at age 37.The movie eschews contemporary talking-head interviews, instead showing speakers such as Fran Lebowitz, a close friend of Wojnarowicz and Hujar, as they were in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is a strategic move, designed to make the movie’s final scene — in which several survivors of the artist and the era, now much older (a couple more frail than others), are shown attending a 2018 Whitney retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre — more powerful. It works. Shatteringly.WojnarowiczNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

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      ‘Before the Dying of the Light’ Review: Moroccan Cinema’s Attempted Revolution

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      This Ali Essafi documentary presents an inspiring view of the roiling visual-arts scene in 1970s Morocco.In 1968, the first substantive film festival was hosted in Tangier, Morocco, an event not mentioned in this impressionistic documentary directed by Ali Essafi. For the most part, “Before the Dying of the Light” is an immersive creation — its on-screen texts mostly philosophical rather than explanatory.The date of that festival is significant, though, because it can be seen as an indicator of emergent Moroccan cinema, which in the 1970s aligned itself with other visual arts and briefly, under the oppressive regime of King Hassan II, tried to forge an authentic politically pertinent body of work.
      Essafi assembles and presents staggering images. He juxtaposes on-the-street archival interviews; multiple covers of literary magazines, both in Arabic and French (France claimed the country as a “protectorate” from the 1910s until the mid-1950s); newsreel clips; scenes from European films shot in Morocco; and Morocco-produced mainstream films (including 1973’s “A Thousand and One Hands,” directed by Souheil Ben-Barka and starring the American actress Mimsy Farmer).These are interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the 1974 film “About Some Meaningless Events.” Its filmmakers, led by the director Mostafa Derkaoui, are very self-interrogating, as was the custom in leftist aesthetics around the world at the time. Contemplating how to best use working-class people in the picture, a team member says, “We could write a script”; another immediately counters, “No.” Their obsessing about how to best capture the spirit of their times resulted in a picture that was suppressed soon after it was completed.Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.Before the Dying of the LightNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 8 minutes. Watch through MoMA’s Virtual Cinema. More

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      ‘Operation Varsity Blues’ Review: Failing the Ethics Test

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      Chris Smith’s gripping documentary looks deeper into the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal.Pop quiz: Name the mastermind behind the 2019 college bribery conspiracy that sent the actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin to prison. Answer: William Singer (also known as Rick), the serial fabulist who guaranteed he could get any kid into an elite school for a price — or rather, a “donation” — only to become an F.B.I. informant and cede the media glare to Loughlin, the former star of “Full House.”The gripping documentary “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal” (streaming on Netflix) shifts the spotlight back to Singer, played in re-enactments by Matthew Modine with dialogue taken directly from wiretaps, to understand how a flip flop-clad former basketball coach rebranded himself as an academic glad-hander for the 1 percent.The director Chris Smith (“American Movie,” “Fyre”) specializes in ambitious monomaniacs. That describes Singer, who slept three hours a night, often on an airplane or in a van. That also describes the families Singer served, alpha tycoons and go-getters seen pacing anxiously in front of swimming pools, who believed their child’s life was kaput without a slot at a top university. Their phone conversations with Modine’s Singer snap with the blunt force of powerful people used to getting what they want. Cracks one father, “Is there a two-for-one special for twins?”Matthew Modine portrays Singer during reenactments in the film.NetflixSince neither Singer nor his clients agreed to be interviewed, Smith subs in college counselors to expound on the toxicity of an application process that upholds privilege in ways both straightforward (private test tutors), subtle (athletic admissions for upper-class sports like sailing or water polo), and suspicious (say, Charles Kushner’s $2.5 million donation to Harvard shortly before his son Jared’s acceptance). Singer merely exploited loopholes that continue to exist.As for the less-privileged students, they’re shown in a montage of home videos sobbing to learn they’ve been rejected by the school of their dreams. A few, however, earn a space despite the odds — and the pride on their faces can’t be bought for any price.Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions ScandalRated R. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Martha: A Picture Story’ Review: Snapshots of a Career

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Martha: A Picture Story’ Review: Snapshots of a CareerThis documentary recounts the work of Martha Cooper, a photographer instrumental in establishing the validity of street art.The photographer Martha Cooper.Credit…Janette Beckman/UtopiaMarch 16, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMartha: A Picture StoryDirected by Selina MilesDocumentary, Biography1h 22mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Martha: A Picture Story” turns the camera around on Martha Cooper, a photographer who captured the era when graffiti-covered subway cars crisscrossed New York, and who was among the first to give serious consideration to the artists who scrawled on those trains. The book “Subway Art,” Cooper’s 1984 collaboration with the photographer Henry Chalfant, developed an international underground following, providing a stylistic template — Cooper’s word — for aspiring graffiti writers.In this documentary, directed by Selina Miles, Cooper and her associates take us through her career, from a stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand to her work snapping street scenes for The New York Post. Now in her 70s, Cooper is still working, and Miles trails her as she seeks to document a neighborhood in southwest Baltimore, her hometown. (In the sort of interplay between subject and film crew that “Martha: A Picture Story” could have used more of, Cooper at one point asks that the movie camera be turned off — she needs to gain her subjects’ trust first.)[embedded content]Cooper is unafraid of risks. Near the beginning and end, we watch her accompany street artists in Germany on furtive missions. There is poignancy in seeing her reminisce with Jay Edlin (known as J.SON), a graffiti artist and historian, at a cleaned-up subway station in the Bronx.The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story.Martha: A Picture StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Allen v. Farrow’ Episode 4 Recap: An Adult Dylan Farrow Speaks Out

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Allen v. Farrow’ Episode 4 Recap: An Adult Dylan Farrow Speaks OutThe finale of the HBO docuseries delves into the changing perception of Woody Allen and Ms. Farrow’s decision to go public with her allegations of sexual abuse.Frank Maco, the former Connecticut state’s attorney who decided not to press charges in an investigation, with Dylan Farrow, in “Allen v. Farrow.”Credit…HBOMarch 14, 2021The final installment of “Allen v. Farrow,” an HBO documentary series examining Dylan Farrow’s sexual abuse allegations against her adopted father, Woody Allen, covers the years from 1993, when a state’s attorney declined to prosecute the filmmaker, to the present.The previous three episodes explored what Ms. Farrow says happened on Aug. 4, 1992, when she was 7 years old — that her father sexually assaulted her in the attic of the family’s Connecticut country home. The filmmakers combed through police and court documents, scrutinized the integrity of the investigations into her accusation and sought expert analysis of video footage of young Dylan telling her mother what happened.Mr. Allen has long denied sexually abusing his daughter and has accused her mother, Mia Farrow — Mr. Allen’s ex-girlfriend — of concocting the sexual-assault accusation because she was angry at him for having a sexual relationship with her college-age daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. (Mr. Allen and Ms. Previn later married.) A spokesperson for Mr. Allen, who did not participate in the documentary, said that it is “riddled with falsehoods.”The finale covers the world’s reaction to the events of the early 1990s, Mr. Allen’s continued fame and accolades and, in recent years, a growing unwillingness among those in Hollywood to be associated with him after the #MeToo Movement.The prosecutor’s decisionThe episode begins on Sept. 24, 1993. That day, Frank Maco, a Connecticut state’s attorney, announced that although he had “probable cause” to prosecute Mr. Allen, he had decided he would not press charges to spare Ms. Farrow the potential trauma of a trial.Mr. Maco, who was interviewed extensively for the documentary, says that earlier that month in 1993, he had met with young Dylan in his office, with toys in the room and a female state trooper there. When Mr. Maco asked about her father, he said, she froze up and would not respond.“The strongest proponents for prosecution just looked at me, and we all shrugged our shoulders,” Mr. Maco said. “We weren’t going anywhere with this child.”In a news conference, Mr. Allen said that rather that being happy or grateful for the decision, he said he was “merely disgusted” that his children had been “made to suffer unbearably by the unwholesome alliance between a vindictive mother and a cowardly, dishonest, irresponsible state’s attorney and his police.”“I felt if I had just kept his secret,” Ms. Farrow says, “I could have spared my mom all this grief, and my brothers and sister — myself.”Credit…HBODylan grows upIn the years after the police investigation and the custody trial, which ended in her mother’s favor, Ms. Farrow says she suffered through a long period of guilt, thinking that she was at fault for the family rift.“I felt if I had just kept his secret,” she tells the filmmakers, “I could have spared my mom all this grief, and my brothers and sister — myself.”Siblings say in the series that Ms. Farrow often kept to herself and seemed riddled with anxiety. She says that she didn’t talk about the assault in depth with anyone — not even her mother or her therapist. In high school, she recalls, she broke up with her only boyfriend after only three weeks because she anticipated that he would want to be intimate with her.Ronan Farrow, Ms. Farrow’s brother, tells the filmmakers that his mother tried to distance her children from Mr. Allen. But, he says, “there was always a lot of incentive to be drawn into Woody Allen’s efforts to discredit” his sister. For example, Mr. Farrow says, Mr. Allen had made him an offer that if he spoke out against his mother and his sister publicly, Mr. Allen would help pay for his college education.After an awards showThe saga returned to the public discourse in 2014, after Mr. Allen received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes. In the past, Mr. Farrow tells filmmakers, he had discouraged his sister from speaking publicly about their father and the events of the 1990s with the hope that the family could put it behind them.But after the awards show, Mr. Farrow tweeted, “Missed the Woody Allen tribute — did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?” Ms. Farrow says that her brother’s willingness to speak publicly about the subject emboldened her to write about her memory of events, which were appeared in The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog. (Mr. Farrow, who helped his sister publish the open letter, said that after another newspaper declined to print the account, he took it to Mr. Kristof, a family friend.) Mr. Allen later published an Op-Ed in The Times denying his daughter’s allegations.For two decades, Ms. Farrow says, she felt isolated and alone because of her experience. After publishing her letter, she received an outpouring of messages from people she knew sharing their own experiences with sexual abuse.Loyalty to Mr. AllenStill, many Hollywood actors remained loyal to Mr. Allen despite the accusations, and his star power and industry reputation remained mostly intact..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-coqf44{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-coqf44 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-coqf44 em{font-style:italic;}.css-coqf44 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-coqf44 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#333;text-decoration-color:#333;}.css-coqf44 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Understand the Allegations Against Woody AllenNearly 30 years ago, Woody Allen was accused of sexually abusing Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter. A new docuseries re-examines the case.This timeline reviews the major events in the complicated history of the director, his children and the Farrow family.The documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering spoke about delving into this thorny family tale. Read our recaps of episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 and episode 4.Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter in 2014, posted by the New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, recounting her story in detail.Our book critic reviewed Mr. Allen’s recent memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic, grappled with the accusations and his complicated feelings on the filmmaker in 2018. Four days after Ms. Farrow’s letter was published, her brother Moses Farrow told People Magazine that she was never molested. He also said that Mia Farrow coached the children to hate Mr. Allen and that she often hit him as a child. When Dylan Farrow learned what her brother said, she burst into tears, saying, “It was like I had been told that this person that I knew and loved and trusted was gone.”In interviews with the filmmakers, Ronan Farrow along with two more siblings, Fletcher Previn and Daisy Previn, say that the abuse allegations against their mother were untrue.In 2018, Moses Farrow followed up with a blog post that continued to dispute his sister’s account of sexual abuse. He targeted a specific detail of her story, which she had included in The Times letter: that while Mr. Allen sexually assaulted her, she remembers focusing on her brother’s electric train set, which had been traveling in circles around the attic. Mr. Farrow said that there was no electric train set in the attic. In Mr. Allen’s recent memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” he also disputed that detail, calling it a “fresh creative touch.”But, according to police documents, the detectives investigating the alleged assault did find a train set in the attic. A detailed drawing from 1992, which is shown in the episode, includes an object labeled “toy train track” in the attic crawl space.Ms. Farrow with her mother, Mia Farrow.Credit…HBODylan, decades laterThis episode captures Ms. Farrow’s adult life, 28 years after she says her father assaulted her. It shows her husband, Sean, whom she met on a dating site linked to The Onion, and Ms. Farrow, now 35, playing with their young daughter.At one point, Mia Farrow asks her daughter, “Do you ever feel angry at me?” referring to her choice to bring Mr. Allen into the family. In response, Dylan Farrow says that, first and foremost, she was glad that her mother believed her account of that day in 1992, saying, “You were there when it mattered.”Another scene in the episode shows Mr. Maco, the state’s attorney, meeting with Ms. Farrow — their first encounter since 1993.Mr. Maco said that he told Mia Farrow that when her daughter becomes an adult, he would be happy to answer any questions. That opportunity came last fall — and the documentary team recorded their conversation.“A part of me really, really wishes that I could have done it,” Dylan Farrow tells Mr. Maco, “that I could have had my day in court.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Leon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLeon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84He spent 22 years making an Oscar-winning movie about the 1974 Ali-Foreman boxing match, considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time.Leon Gast at his home in Manhattan in 1997. His film about the heavyweight fight billed as “the Rumble in the Jungle” won the Academy Award that year for best documentary feature. Credit…Librado Romero/The New York TimesMarch 12, 2021Updated 7:38 p.m. ETLeon Gast, a filmmaker whose 22-year quest to make “When We Were Kings,” a documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s epic 1974 boxing match, involved a Liberian shell company, the Hells Angels, a drug deal gone bad, the singer Wyclef Jean and ultimately an Academy Award, died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 84.His wife, Geri Spolan-Gast, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Mr. Gast was a young filmmaker who had already directed one major documentary, about New York’s Latin music scene, when he learned in 1974 of a plan by the boxing promoter Don King to stage a combination music festival and boxing match in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo).A company in London had agreed to pay for the dozens of performers at the festival, including James Brown, Miriam Makeba and B.B. King, while Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire, put up $10 million to split between the boxers in the fight’s main event, Foreman and Ali.Mr. Gast, who had boxed in high school, lugged his projector to Mr. King’s offices in Rockefeller Center, where he lobbied for the job of making a film about the music festival, with clips of the fight interspersed. Mr. King wanted a Black director, but he liked Mr. Gast’s work, and he hired Mr. Gast after he agreed to hire Black crew members.Muhammad Ali sending George Foreman to the canvas during their historic 1974 championship fight. Mr. Gast bet his friend the writer Hunter S. Thompson that Ali, the underdog, would win. He won the bet. Credit…Red/Associated PressThe fight, billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” was to take place on Sept. 25, 1974, preceded by the three-day music festival. But on Sept. 17, Foreman cut his forehead while sparring; he needed 11 stitches, and the fight was pushed back six weeks.Many of the boxing fans and reporters who had traveled to Zaire left, but Mr. Gast decided to stick around. He had a sense of the drama unfolding: Ali was 32 years old, considered over the hill for a boxer and certainly no match for Foreman, 25, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, whose 40-0 record included 37 knockouts.“The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali,” one of his admirers, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, said on television, “because very honestly I do not think he can beat George Foreman.”But Ali was unfazed. While Foreman — who at the time was reserved to the point of surliness — refused to be interviewed, Ali opened up to Mr. Gast, who over the next several weeks recorded hours and hours of the former heavyweight champion exercising, sparring, meeting locals and indulging in his famed verbal virtuosity.“If you thought the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait until I kick Foreman’s behind,” Ali said at one point; another time, he said: “Only last week, I murdered a rock. Injured a stone. Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick!”He even suggested when and how Mr. Gast’s crew should film him.“One day Muhammad told us: ‘In the morning when I run, I come around that corner with the sun and the river behind me,’” Mr. Gast told The New York Times in 1997. “‘Put your camera over there. It’ll be a great shot.’ He was right. It was a great shot.”Foreman was favored to win by 4-to-1 odds, but Mr. Gast had faith in his newfound friend. He bet the writer Hunter S. Thompson $100, at 3 to 1, that Ali would prevail.The fight finally took place on Oct. 30 — at 4 a.m., to accommodate audiences watching it in theaters in the United States — under a giant poster of Mr. Sese Seko. Ali had bragged for weeks about how he was going to “dance” around the ring to avoid Foreman’s powerful fists. But instead he leaned back against the ropes, absorbing blows until Foreman wore out, after which Ali delivered a knockout punch. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy, and it stunned the estimated one billion people watching around the world.Back in New York to assemble the film, Mr. Gast immediately ran into problems. Ticket sales from the music festival were supposed to have paid his production costs, but after the fight was delayed, Mr. Sese Seko had declared it free as a way to drum up attendance.Ali was the undisputed star of the Gast film, playing to the camera and showing off his verbal virtuosity. “I’m so mean,” he said, “I make medicine sick!”Credit…Anthology Film ArchivesMr. Gast couldn’t even get ahold of the 300,000 feet of footage he had shot. The London-based company that Mr. King said would bankroll the project turned out to be a cover for a shell company based in the Cayman Islands and owned by Stephen Tolbert, the Liberian minister of finance. Mr. Gast flew to Liberia to arrange for more money, but before they could make a deal, Mr. Tolbert died in a plane crash.Mr. Gast’s lawyer, David Sonenberg, sued in a British court, and after a year Mr. Gast had his film, plus hours and hours of audio, piled up in the bedrooms and hallways of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.What he did not have was money, and so he took on a series of side projects. At one point the Hells Angels hired him to make a film that would counter their reputation as violent criminals — though they undercut their own case when several of them beat up Mr. Gast (without seriously injuring him) for refusing to give them editorial control. (The film, “Hells Angels Forever,” was widely panned.)Not all of Mr. Gast’s moneymaking efforts were film-related, or legal. One night in June 1979 he and at least four other men were waiting by an airport near Charleston, W.Va., for a plane carrying some 10 tons of marijuana, which they were smuggling from Colombia. But the aircraft crashed on landing, spilling its contents down a hillside. Mr. Gast was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a $10,000 fine and five years’ probation.In 1989, after years of struggling, Mr. Gast reconnected with Mr. Sonenberg, who had since become a successful music manager. Mr. Gast persuaded him to underwrite the rest of the production process, and even to let him use a room in his Manhattan townhouse as a studio.Mr. Gast was still intent on centering the film on the festival. But one day one of Mr. Sonenberg’s clients, the hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, was in the studio when Mr. Gast was editing a clip of Ali. Mr. Jean was enraptured, and asked to see more and more of the footage. Mr. Sonenberg and Mr. Gast decided to re-edit the film, this time focusing on the fighters, with the music festival as the background. They brought in the director Taylor Hackford, who helped edit the film and conducted interviews with Spike Lee, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer (the last two had covered the fight as reporters).Mr. Sonenberg suggested calling the film “When We Were Kings” as a nostalgic reference to the musical and sports royalty who gathered for the event. He even got Mr. Jean and his group, the Fugees, to provide music.In 1996, Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where they received a special jury citation and 17 distribution offers. Critics praised the film, which nearly swept the awards for documentary films that season — including, in early 1997, the Academy Award for best documentary feature.At the Oscar ceremony, Ali, who by then had developed Parkinson’s disease, rose from his seat to join Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg in accepting the award. Foreman, his former nemesis, came up behind him. When Ali had trouble mounting the stage, Foreman took his arm and helped him up.Mr. Gast, right, in March 1997 after winning the Oscar for best documentary feature. With him was the executive producer, David Sonenberg, along with Ali and Foreman.Credit…Sam Mircovich/ReutersLeon Jacques Gast was born in Jersey City, N.J., on March 30, 1936. His father, Samuel Gast, worked in real estate; his mother, Madeleine (Baumann) Gast, was a homemaker.Leon played basketball at Seton Hall University and then transferred to Columbia, where he studied film and photography but left without a degree.He found a job at an advertising agency as a still photographer, and his work appeared in Vogue and Esquire. When his company opened a film division, he transferred to making commercials — his first was for Preparation H.Mr. Gast moved away from advertising in the late 1960s as he began to get work in the music industry, designing album covers and making short films. In 1972 he directed “Our Latin Thing,” a cinéma vérité profile of performers like Willie Colón, Jose Feliciano and Johnny Pacheco. Five years later he released “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert film co-directed with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.In 1991 Mr. Gast married Geri Spolan, who survives him, along with two sons from a previous marriage, Daniel and Clifford; a stepdaughter, Sara Marricco; and six grandchildren.After “When We Were Kings,” he made two more major documentaries: “Smash His Camera” (2010), about the celebrity photographer Ron Galella, and “Manny” (2015), about the boxer Manny Pacquiao, which Mr. Gast directed with Ryan Moore.Mr. Gast and his wife moved to Woodstock in 2005 and became involved in the Woodstock Film Festival. In 2018 he presented a cut of his latest project, a film about the history of the town.Despite his nearly 60 years in film, Mr. Gast’s career, and most likely his legacy, remains bound to the loquacious boxer he followed around Zaire in 1974 — a fact that he did not seem to regret.“When I started on it, my kids were in grade school,” he told Newsday in 1997. “I’m a grandfather now. I’m 60, and I’ve spent more than a third of my life working on this. I can’t even remember when I wasn’t thinking about it, when I wasn’t thinking about Ali.”Jack Begg contributed research.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More