Soon to premiere at the LA Film Festival, Eddie Alcazar's documentary
Tapia chronicles the turbulent life of champion boxer Johnny Tapia as told in his own words via the final interviews granted before his untimely death.
Albuquerque-born boxer Johnny Tapia's life was a maelstrom of turmoil.
The glory of his punishing ring prowess and handful of world titles
across three weight classes forever jockeyed with personal demons: his
mother's kidnapping and murder when he was 8, drug addiction, mental
illness and suicide attempts.
Before the fighter's tragic death
last year at the age of 45, director Eddie Alcazar spent time with Tapia
researching a biopic. What would become his last interviews are now the
beating heart of Alcazar's gripping, elegiac documentary. In it, the
bedeviled, soft-spoken champion opens up about the severe ups and downs
of a life in which the strategic ferocity of the ring may have been the
only true sanctuary for a soul routinely beaten down outside the ropes.
While the film recently received a major bump in name value with word that Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson was coming on board as an executive producer to help it find distribution, all the footage that we've seen so far says that this one is more than capable of speaking for itself. Take a look at the teaser below.