Muhammad Ali’s Daughter Hana Ali Shares Insight On Childhood In ‘I Am Ali’Posted by Wilson Morales
October 8, 2014
In theaters this week is a new amazing documentaries on one of the greatest sports figures and living legends of all-time, Muhammad Ali.
From the producers of the award-winning SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN comes an intimate and heart-warming look at the man behind the legend
Directed by Clare Lewins, I AM ALI is told through exclusive, unprecedented access to Muhammad Ali’s personal archive of ‘audio journals’ combined with touching interviews and testimonials from his inner circle of family and friends, including his daughters, son, ex-wife and brother, plus legends of the boxing community including Mike Tyson, George Foreman and Gene Kilroy. Experience Ali’s extraordinary story, as a fighter, lover, brother, father – told from the inside for the very first time.
Blackfilm.com had the opportunity to speak with Hana Ali, daughter of Muhammad and Veronica Porsche Ali and older sister of Laila Ali. Hana was instrumental in sharing with Clare the recordings that are rare to the world and gives an insight growing up with her father.
Having seen my share of documentaries on your father, this is the first in which I saw you participate in. What led you to contribute your memories for this project?
Hana Ali: Actually, I’ve done a few documentaries such as The Trials of Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World and I would be the first one to do anything that has to do with my father. I just love talking about him, writing about him, and all things. The reason I licensed the audio that Clare has in the film was because how beautifully and wonderfully she has crafted the piece. After doing an interview with her at my father’s 70th birthday in Las Vegas, she showed me some clips, about six to seven minutes and they were so wonderful. I told her I wanted to share something with her and it was a 30 minute clip, audio, picture recording that I made up for my father. That’s when she knew that several recordings existed. From there on, she was contacting me to lend her these audio recordings, but I had my own vision and I’m doing my book.
There’s actually 12 minutes of the recordings in the film and I have about 80-90 hours worth and she did a brilliant job and the way she placed them in the film. It’s almost like a reality series when you see my father recording a portion of himself and our lives back then when he retired from boxing. Laila and I grew up together with daddy in Los Angeles in Fremont Place and that’s where 90% of the recordings were made. The other 10% were made in his parents’ house or wherever he traveled around the world. A lot of them are telephone conversations or him playing with me and Laila, getting us to go to sleep or going to school. He recorded my mother, his parents, and he even recorded himself calling Joe Frazier to wish him a Merry Christmas. He talked to George Foreman about God and life and religion. I was home for months and listening to these recordings, I felt as if I was in The Twilight Zone. There’s also a recording of when I was three years old and he’s telling me why he’s recording this and how time and history are important, and he ended it by telling me he loves me, he loves Laila, and he loves all his children. My heart just melted and I have share this with the world, and I met Clare, and now you have this film.
At what point in your life did you realize what your father did and how big he was in life?
HA: My first memory was probably when I was three years old and being at a lot of airports. He used to take us traveling with him at that time when he was retired. We would go to the airport and I remembered a time when my daddy picked me up with his arm so he could rush down and catch the plane. I remember the crowd of people watching in awe and screaming “You’re The Greatest” and “We Love You” and applauding him. I remembering looking at my daddy and asking myself, “Who is this man?” There were times where we would wake up in the mornings and we couldn’t go with him and I’m begging him to go and he said no. He wasn’t just my father, he was a daddy to the world. When he left town, he was Muhammad Ali, but when he was home, he was daddy.
What’s make this film special from the other docs on your father?
HA: I think when people see this film, they will be in awe. There’s nothing in this film that’s ever been done before. They will be moved in silence. Yes, there’s a recapping of who my father is and where he is now, but the recordings and footage that Clare used have never been used before. For people who know the history of my father, they will watch this and walk away with something they never had before. They will know something new about this human being, about this man and how wonderful he was. My father always said, “The world thinks I’m Superman, but I’m not. Now that I have Parkingson’s, I just a man like everyone else.” He’s an extraordinary human being. There have been so many documentaries told with the same approach, but Clare managed to get all new content and you will feel that my father himself is telling you the story because of the way he used this recordings. Now that his voice is gone, they become more valuable because it’s like he’s giving us back a gift and we’ll have that forever. There are no tapes after 1986.
