The Fight Of His Life

NEW YORK

Kassim Ouma landed at Dulles International Airport in February 1998 with one of the lamest plans in the history of travel.

A 19-year-old deserter from the Ugandan army, he arrived vastly underdressed for winter, a season he'd never seen, then started hitchhiking. When a cabdriver pulled over and asked where he was going, Ouma said "Richmond," because he had heard that Ugandans live there. The driver assumed he meant Richmond Highway, a misimpression that Ouma was in no position to correct because he didn't speak English and knew nothing about U.S. geography. He was dropped off at a rather dingy Alexandria motel, where he lived until his money ran out.

That took two weeks. When Ouma was homeless, he moved in and out of shelters, and on and off the streets, and found work delivering fliers for a pizza joint. Instead of simply dropping the circulars at the front door, as instructed, he would knock and ask everyone who answered the same question, using two words he had picked up: "Boxing gym?" he'd say, usually to blank stares. "Boxing gym?"

Yes, this was the sum total of his plan: (1) fly to the United States, and (2) box. A month after he'd arrived in the country, Phase 2 began when Ouma spotted the Alexandria Boxing Club and waited there until the club's manager, Dennis Trotter, showed up to unlock the door.

"There's this guy waiting outside the gym," Trotter recalls one recent afternoon. "Didn't understand a word he said. And he didn't understand a word we were saying. We just knew that he wanted to box."

Ouma's highly improvised arrival in the country is part of "Kassim the Dream," a documentary showing Friday and Sunday at the Silverdocs festival at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. The film, which charts Ouma's path to the junior middleweight title, initially looks like an anything-is-possible American success story with a "Heart of Darkness" twist.

Ouma, we learn, had been abducted from his boarding school at age 6 by the National Resistance Army, a rebel force that would eventually topple the government. He grew up torturing whomever he was told to torture and killing whomever he was told to kill. And up to the moment he decided to fly to the United States, he assumed he had no choice but to live the rest of his life as a soldier.

The bleakness of his upbringing, and Ouma's eventual triumph, could have led "Dream" into "Rocky" territory. But Kief Davidson, the director and producer, doesn't pitch his protagonist as a hero. Ouma, he knows, is too complicated for that. The lad has serious discipline issues, including a propensity for drinking and smoking pot when he's training for big fights.

He also has some growing up to do. After he was allowed back into Uganda in 2006, following a lengthy negotiation to ensure that the army wouldn't execute him for desertion, he held a news conference in the Entebbe airport where he offered this shout-out to President Yoweri Museveni: "I love you, my [N word]."

You watch "Kassim the Dream" unsure whether you want to adopt Kassim or smack him upside the head. You're wowed by his achievements but worried about his future. Which is how Davidson felt as he shot the movie.

"I pretty much wanted to show Kassim the way I perceive him," Davidson says. "I think he has a huge heart, and at his core he's a good person. But he's incredibly frustrating, and he's got a dark side that you don't want to get near. It saddens me quite a bit. And his story isn't done. He's 29 years old."