FREESTYLE: THE ART OF RHYME

DOCUMENTARY, US, 2004, 75 minutes

Director: Kevin Fitzgerald
Producer: Tiare White
Featuring: JUICE, Supernatural, Notorious B.l.G., Mos Def
Part of the High Falls Film Festival Young Adult Series

Director Kevin Fitzgerald spent 10 years on this labor of love documentary, gathering hours of footage of street-based freestylers and battle-rappers – whose only “rules” are don’t make up your rhymes ahead of time and don’t engage in physical violence. Exuberantly capturing the spirit of the movement on street corners and on nightclub stages, Fitzgerald (aka DJ Organic) spends time with the best of the best – Juice, Craig G, Supernatural – battlers whose ferocious performances have become the stuff of legends. The film also explores the emergence of freestyling as an art form, and makes important connections to the improvisation of jazz, the rhetorical genius of Muhammed Ali, the ecstatic performances of black preachers and seminal proto-rap figures like The Last Poets. Interwoven into the mix are chance encounters with such future megastars as Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. With a running time of little over an hour the film is savvy enough, like any good rapper, to leave audiences hungry for more. (compiled by Ruth Cowing)

Tiare White is a graduate of the A.F.I. Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies, and co-founder of Industrial Media Arts, a content development company in Santa Monica, California. She is the author, with Camille Landau, of the best selling What They Don't Teach You at Film School, published by Hyperion Books. She is currently working for the television show The Biggest Loser.