Sundance may be the most powerful festival devoted to American independent films, but in recent years it’s become a careerist’s stepping-stone to Hollywood. Fortunately there are still insurgent showcases like the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, which remains committed to exhibiting unknown and unheralded artists.
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With its traveling “Spotlight Series,” the LA festival turns up here with a screening of Kevin Fitzgerald’s impressive hour-long hip-hop documentary, Freestyle, which won the best sound track award at the March event. Exploring the streets and underground clubs of Brooklyn, San Francisco, New York’s Lower East Side, and LA’s South Central, Fitzgerald traces the cultural, political, and musical lineage of hip-hop, noting such stylistic precedents as black Baptist preachers, scat singers, and Muhammad Ali. The title refers to the form’s particular brand of storytelling, defined by one of its subjects as “a spontaneous expression of self,” by another as the intertwining of language and image “without a net, a single thought or expression that you rhyme off.”
