IN CINEMA
Congo In Harlem 16
ZAIRE 74 – RARE OUTTAKES FROM THE MAYSLES ARCHIVE
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Wednesday, October 16th at 7PM
Co-presented by Friends of the Congo
With generous support from Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) and V-Day
Maysles Archives, 1974, 58 min.
Albert Maysles worked on countless productions over the course of his long and storied career, but notably, he was one of the cinematographers who traveled to Kinshasa with fellow documentarian Leon Gast to record ZAIRE 74, a three-day music festival leading up to the “Rumble in the Jungle” between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. The various film teams were instructed to film everything, and amassed a vast trove of footage documenting the concert promoters, musicians, celebrity guests, Ali’s boxing team, and street life in Kinshasa. It took Gast over 22 years to edit and finance the resulting film, When We Were Kings (1996), which has become the definitive account of this legendary event. Over a decade later, a second film, Soul Power (2008) was created from the concert footage that was not included in When We Were Kings. But there is still more material that never made it into either film – this is a selection of rarely screened outtakes from Albert Maysles’ personal archive, that will take you behind the scenes of a truly iconic and historic cultural event.
Post screening discussion with special guests TBA!