Slam (Blu-ray)

The winner of the 1998 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera D’or at the Cannes Film Festival, Slam is a landmark independent film presented in a new restoration. It is a powerful work of cinéma vérité that portrays the story of a young black performance poet, Raymond Joshua (Saul Williams, Neptune Frost), who is arrested and imprisoned for a petty marijuana charge in a Washington, D.C. jail. Although the confining prison walls do little to shield him from danger, it is within those walls that Raymond establishes his identity, strength and voice, and meets a prison gang leader (Bonz Malone, Shaft) and a prison writing teacher, Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn, The Wire). Bell inspires Raymond to use the power of creative expression to free himself from the struggles and demise of the black male, as another victim of the judicial system.