Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme premiered at Slamdance, and won awards at Woodstock, Florida, Urban World and Los Angeles film festivals: 

“After agreeing to collaborate rather than compete on a movie about freestyle rap, with director Kevin Fitzgerald and producer Henry-Alex Rubin, my first challenge was to bring structure and narrative to Kevin’s sprawling, lengthy rough cut that was already making the rounds as a work-in-progress at film festivals. 

The piece shown here was an element of that original, now polished up and integrated into the final movie.

Then I incorporated my own work-in-progress footage to the mix (including an interview with the amazing Juice from Chicago). Next step was to identify and to collect interviews and footage that we needed but didn’t have yet in order develop the new cut into a viable feature film. 

That included not only shooting new material, but also recruiting every underground hip hop artist we could find to contribute their archival footage to the mix. My little home office in Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan became freestyle-central for a year or so, with many interesting visits and collaborations."