Muhammad Ali

Community Cinema ~ The Trials of Muhammed Ali

Monday, February 10, 2014 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
  • Library Hall

No conventional sports documentary, The Trials of Muhammed Ali investigates its extraordinary and often complex subject's life outside the boxing ring.
A new documentary film by Bill Siegel and Kartemquin Films

About The Trials of Muhammed Ali
This is a feature-length documentary film covering Ali’s toughest bout, his battle to overturn the five-year prison sentence he received for refusing U.S. military service. Trials is not a boxing film. It is a fight film tracing a formative period in Ali’s life, one that is remarkably unknown to young people today and tragically neglected by those who remember him as a boxer, but overlook how controversial he was when he first took center stage.

Prior to becoming the most recognizable face on earth, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and found himself in the crosshairs of conflicts concerning civil rights, religion, and wartime dissent. The fury he faced from an American public enraged by his opposition to the Vietnam War and unwilling to accept his conversion to Islam, has global implications for generations now coming of age amidst contemporary fissures involving freedom, faith and military conflict.

Today, people are more likely to be introduced to Ali via footage of him lighting the Olympic torch in 1996, or being given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. This film zeroes in on the years 1967 to 1970, when Ali lived in exile within the U.S., stripped of his heavyweight belt and banned from boxing, sacrificing fame and fortune on principle. As we follow Ali’s struggle for justice through its final round in the Supreme Court, the film explores his political, spiritual, and cultural dimensions from his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to the far corners of the earth, enabling audiences to consider the full resonance of Ali for all time.

RUN TIME: 94 min.

ABOUT COMMUNITY CINEMA
Community Cinema is a groundbreaking public education and civic engagement initiative featuring free monthly screenings of films from the Emmy Award-winning series Independent Lens and other PBS presentations. Community Cinema is on location in more than 100 cities nationally, bringing together leading organizations, community members, and public television stations to learn, discuss, and get involved in key social issues of our time.

ABOUT ITVS
The Independent Television Service funds, presents, and promotes award-winning documentaries and dramas on public television, innovative new media projects on the Web, and the Emmy® Award-winning weekly series Independent Lens. Mandated by Congress in 1988 and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ITVS has brought more than one thousand independently produced programs to date to American audiences.  www.itvs.org

Made possible by a partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS.