Dawg Fight, 2015 - ★★★★½

You can also find this review on Letterboxd

I think this is my first review of a documentary, so be gentle.

This documentary was about Dhafir "Dada" Harris and his backyard fighting promotion. He lives in a neighbourhood with 65% (I think) black people, and they are not rich people. He does everything himself, it's in his yard, he sets up the ring, he is the announcer, hires the "talent" and sets up the match card. Also, he is the referee ... so the only thing he doesn't do (anymore) is fighting. He does this so that the poor people of his neighbourhood get a chance to maybe get into professional fighting.

Even though the fights are illegal and if someone died, he'd go to jail, he doesn't stop. We always get people who tell us why it's dangerous and illegal, but we also get the reasoning of Dada and his people as to why they do it: it takes the crime off the street. One quote of Dada I really liked is something about how at the evening of the events they know that no crime happens because everyone is at the fight.

We also get to know other characters and a little bit of why they are there. We also get many fights. Hard brawls in the street and the fights are very interesting, but really not the main point of the documentary. Mostly it's about the people and reasons, but also about the neighbourhood, how bad they have it. We also realise that hard work can bring you to the top, as we see Dada have his first MMA fight.

Now to the technical stuff:
The camera work was good, most of the time we had multi-camera shooting, so we always get more than one camera angles when we see something.
The music was chosen good, it fitted to the topic and neighbourhood.
I liked when they used black and white when they showed bleeding, beat up faces. In those shots they used black and white, but the blood was red. On the one hand it made the blood stand out more, but it also took back a little from the gruesome reality of how beat up they are at the end.

Maybe it is glorifying the illegal backyard fighting a little, but it always shows bad sides and lawyers talking, to have a contraposition.

All in all I really enjoyed this documentary, it showed me a world I didn't know much about and it was very interesting. I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

PS: We get TWO training montages, just what every sports movie needs.