About this Event
View map Free Event(Marc Levin, 1998, USA, 104 minutes)
New 4K restoration!
A veritable film festival sensation upon release in 1998—winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the Camera d’Or (best first film) at Cannes, and the Audience Award at the St. Louis International Film Festival that year—Marc Levin’s Slam has largely slipped into undeserved obscurity since. In it, we follow Raymond Joshua (renaissance man Saul Williams, who later played Tupac Shakur on Broadway, released half a dozen volumes of poetry, recorded as many albums, and wrote and co-directed 2022 Webster Film Series hit Neptune Frost), a local slam poet who gets sent to a D.C. prison on a petty marijuana charge. While in prison he comes into the orbit of a thoughtful gang leader (Bonz Malone) and a writing teacher (Sonja Sohn, who later played Detective Kima Greggs on The Wire) and learns to make the most of his situation. Shot in large part in a real prison alongside real prisoners (including a memorable scene where Williams improvises beats and verses alongside a prisoner in a neighboring cell) and featuring a goose-pimply ending, no better time than the release of this new 4K restoration for audiences to (re-) discover this gem of 90s American independent cinema.
0 people are interested in this event
User Activity
No recent activity