The eventual result was called When We Were Kings, and it focuses on the fight, not the festival. When it was released in theaters in 1996, it was an unexpected hit, and the next year it was the recipient of the Academy Award for best documentary. It is really two films at once: a serious and sometimes unsettling portrait of clashing cultures and mixed motives, and also a funky and picturesque movie about a grand caper in Africa. After all, no film starring Ali in his motormouthed prime can entirely fail to be a comedy, and part of what people love about When We Were Kings is its evocation of the sense of mischief that he generated, even when he was doing something as dangerous as fighting George Foreman. Especially then.

Spike Lee says, “There was a time, if you called a black person an African, they’d be ready to fight.” This pronouncement comes near the beginning of the film, in one of the interview segments recorded by producer Taylor Hackford in the early nineties, and it gestures toward the strong but slippery notion of black identity that helped define this clash. In 1964, on a tour through Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt, Ali had declared Africa to be his home. This feeling was doubtless strengthened by the fact that, after Ali joined the Nation of Islam, he had become estranged from America. He refused induction into the military in 1967, and the refusal made him an exile, effectively banned from boxing for more than three years. But in fact, Ali was profoundly American, and in 1974 he arrived in Zaire still knowing little about Africa. When We Were Kings captures Ali in an airplane, sounding genuinely astonished. “Flying over the Sahara Desert on an African airline with all-African stewardesses, with all-African pilots,” he says. “This is strange to the American Negro.” But when it suited him, Ali also described the continent in less flattering terms. “He crazy to go to Africa,” he had said about Foreman, not long after the fight was announced. “They’ll cook him in a pot!”

Ali took great delight in the idea that Africa was enemy territory for Foreman. Local crowds gave Ali a new catchphrase: “Ali, bomaye!”—meaning “Ali, kill him!” And Ali cannily portrayed Foreman as a patriotic American and a faithful Christian, and therefore an honorary “white Belgian,” somehow linked to the colonial power that had ruled that part of Africa for decades. Of course, Foreman, like Ali, was black, a descendant of Africans who had been enslaved in America. And by suggesting that Foreman wasn’t truly black, and therefore couldn’t truly be at home in Africa, Ali was undermining the idea of racial solidarity that he himself relied upon. If Foreman wasn’t truly black, or wasn’t truly African, then who else might be excluded from this club? And why would it make sense to presume that black people around the world should all come together? As the film proceeds, Lee’s early line comes to seem like an ironic description of the event itself: here are two black people at odds over African identity, and very much ready to fight.