Slam

Roymond Joshua - played by Saul Williams, one of Americas lead i ng slam-poets - is a young black poet and rapper, who lives in the Dodge City-district in Washington DC. Everyday life is dominated by the gangs and the war between them. One day Roy's drug dealer get shot in the street while Roy istalkingto him. He gets arrested and in jail he ends up in the middle of two gangs that both wantto recruit him. The dilemma is intensified when he meets Lauren, who teaches the prisoners to write poems.
Different ''realties'' follow each other in Roymond Joshua's odysse through the streets of Washington D.C., in prison and in the performance bars, where poetry and rap-music meet on an equal level. Besides a white lawyer and a white prison guard, Roy only meets black people - judges, lawyers, prisoners, prison guards - as if ''white'' America had vanished. But it is still there, unspoken in every word and every look.
The analogy between the worn concrete blocks of Dodge City and the D.C. jai I is cruel. This analogy also constitutes the existential structure for the young men. They are the subjects of their own beliefs and aggressions, that cripple them and corner them. As Lauren puts it:
''Aggression is your prison''. Roy uses, with his sensuous charisma, rap-music and poetry as a strategy for survival. Verbal kung-fu and lyrical aikido.
Director Marc Levin is most famous for his documentaries. Slam is his first feature film. The actors participated in the writing of the screenplay, after Levin let them improvise in front of the camera. The cinema-verite style, which creates energy and pulse in the film, captures the rapmusic like movements of the bodies and the dialogue, often in close-ups, as well as the mean i ngless state of both the ghetto and the prison. The characters define this state, and the disillusioned strength.
Liberation from one's own aggressions and one's own self-built prison, is what Slam is all about.
GOL POYRAZ

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Medverkande
Saul Williams, Bonz Malone, Sonja Sohn, Beau Sia: Producent
Richard Stratton: Manus
Marc Levin: Foto
Marc Benjamin: Musik
Paul Miller: Talat språk
English