I’ve been on a real documentary kick as of late and here are a few that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who calls Louisville, Kentucky home.
When We Were Kings – Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he was and is the product of both the racial tensions and the revolutionary times and no film shows all of those sides better than When We Were Kings. Ali has become a transcendent figure in his old age – but at the time of the Ali/Foreman fight in 1974, he was still a divisive figure. He went to jail because he refused the Vietnam draft, he joined the Nation of Islam, and to top it off he was a gregarious civil rights activist. But at the core of his being, beneath the pride and the talent was a man who cared deeply about where he came from, who he was and what he and his people could achieve. And all that from a dyslexic street kid from Louisville.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson
Like Ali, Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville and took his natural talent and revolutionary thinking and helped to transform the world. Ali and Thompson ultimately shared a similar fate – crippled by the sport they entered into – Ali crippled by Parkinson’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s drug abuse. Their heydays were amazing shows of force and talent spawned by unbelievable creativity, and their slides into the autumns of their lives are terribly sad.
Harlan County USA
While I might live in Kentucky, I love the rest of the state, from the mines in the east to the lakes in the west and the horses in the middle. And while the people in between might not share the same values that I do here in the “big city” of Louisville, they are nonetheless my people and people that shaped the person who I am today. Harlan County USA is a fascinating snapshot of life in a mining town in Harlan County, Kentucky in the early 1970s. An gripping tale of workers and the machine – and what happens when a people have so few options to survive.
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I have not seen the first two, but I’ve seen the last one and I agree with you that it’s important viewing, especially for Kentuckians. While most of us are not involved in the coal industry, we are all adjacent to it and probably know at least one person directly affected by it(for me: my brother). It was mind-opening and heart breaking. Having lived in eastern Kentucky for half of my life, these are definitely my people. Though I have left those hills behind, those people have shaped who I am and will continue to do so. Their struggles are my struggles. Once upon a time I ran from my culture, and was on a one-woman mission to prove to the world that the hills are not full of just hillbillies. But, somewhere along the way, I realized that it was not through running from it, but rather embracing that part of my history that I show the world just how bright and amazing the people of Appalachia are. In a voyage of self-loathing, I once hated bluegrass music because it represented something I was trying desperately to shed from my skin. However, now it is the only type of country music that I would choose to listen to, because of its genuine, haunting qualities. Plus, I can hear in its tones the bridge across the ocean to the ancestral motherland (so to speak). So, the self-loathing, somewhere along the way, and I can’t say when exactly, turned into self-discovery. In a sense, the prodigal daughter has come home, if only in spirit. :)