Director: Ulrik Wivel (DK)
Genre: Documentary
Denmark, 2001 / 28 min (DigiBeta), colour & sound

The Film
Staceyann Chin, aged 29, is one of America’s most respected and popular poetry slammers. Driven by her strong and musical talent for words and a personal rage, she has taken Poetry Slam as an artistic expression very far. This film is a portrait of her. It tells her story, and lets her introduce the audience to »the athletics of poetry«. Poetry Slam originated in the mid-1980s in Chicago, when a poet came up with the idea of a poetry competition to entertain the Sunday regulars at a bar. Several years later the phenomenon has caught on nationwide in the US.

Ulrik Wivel
Ulrik Wivel (b. 1967), after a course in script writing at Columbia University in 1998, worked as assistant on the writer Paul Auster’s film Lulu on The Bridge. The same year he worked as assisting assistant director on Olsens Bandens sidste strik. In 1999 he was assisting production manager and assistant photographer on Jørgen Leth’s film about Søren Ulrik Thomsen. Since then he has worked as production manager for Anne Belle on her film Stanley Williams. Ulrik Wivel made his debute as film director in 2000 with the film Dancer. Aside from this, he is doing the preparing work for a film about Roskilde Festival.
Ulrik Wivel is a ballet graduate of The Danish Royal Theatre, and has danced as a soloist in the Danish Royal Ballet., The National Ballet of Canada, Pacific North West Ballet and The New York City Ballet. He ended his dancing career in 1998 and has since then been involved in the making of films.
(From: www.barokfilm.dk)