Director Paul Devlin's fast-paced documentary follows four bards as they head to the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, OR. The competition begins with the Grand Slam tournament at New York City's Nuyorican Poets Café, and then it's off to the nationals for chaps Saul Williams, Beau Sia, Mums the Schemer and Jessica Care Moore. The quartet vies against 26 other teams from across the country in a dramatic contest awash with tension, enmity and controversy.
01-01-1998
1h 23m
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Paul Devlin
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Saul Williams
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Saul Stacey Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an American poet, writer, actor and musician known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop and for his leading role in the 1998 independent film Slam.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Saul Williams, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Beau Sia is a Tony Award-winning slam poet. Born to Chinese immigrants from the Philippines in Ohio and raised in Oklahoma City, he moved to New York City for college, earning a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In New York, he began performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which led to his joining the 1996 Nuyorican National Poetry Slam team and being featured in the influential slam poetry documentary SlamNation. Sia is a two-time National Poetry Slam champion and the author of Well Played (2020), The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time (2010), and A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge (1998), a satiric response to Jewel’s poetry collection A Night Without Armor (1999). Sia’s poetry and performances often challenge Asian American stereotypes.
Sia’s work has been anthologized in How to Make a Living as a Poet (2005), Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (1998), among other collections. He has appeared in films, including Rachel Getting Married (2008), Hitch (2005), and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and appeared on Broadway in Def Poetry Jam (2003), for which he won a Tony Award. Sia’s work has been covered by publications including Salon.com and the New York Daily News. He has performed all over the world and facilitated workshops for Urban Word NYC and Youth Speaks. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Craig muMs Grant was born on December 18, 1968 in Bronx, New York, New York, USA. Craig muMs was an actor and writer, known for Dark Water (2005), Side Effects (2013) and Good Time (2017). Craig muMs died on March 24, 2021 in Wilmington, North Carolina, USA.
