Saul Williams

"Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an incongruent mean of babble and brilliance ..."--

Before Russell Simmons' Def Poety Jam, Slamnation captured the cutthroat world of spoken-word poetry. The film follows Saul Williams and three other top poets as they make their way to the National Poetry Slam, the Super Bowl of poetry.

A Manhattan psychiatrist, who thinks he's seen it all until he's assigned to analyze Prot, a psychiatric patient who claims to be from a distant planet called K-PAX. He is convinced that Prot is "a convincing delusional," but his cynicism turns to open-minded fascination as Prot's case reveals a combination of otherworldly insight and all-too-human trauma, prompting an earthbound explanation for Prot's allegedly alien origins.

"As hip-hop rose from the streets of New York to become a multibillion-dollar industry, artists such as Public Enemy and De La Soul began reusing portions of previously recorded music for their songs. But when record company lawyers got involved, everything changed. Years before people started downloading and remixing music, hip-hop sampling sparked a debate about copyright, creativity, and technological change that still rages today." --