Louder Than a Bomb

About

Louder Than a Bomb (99 min.) tells the story of four Chicago high school poetry teams as they prepare to compete in the world’s largest youth slam. By turns hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures the turbulent lives of these unforgettable kids, exploring the ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa. Louder Than a Bomb is not about “high school poetry” as we often think of it. It’s about language as a joyful release, irrepressibly talented teenagers obsessed with making words dance. While the topics they tackle are often deeply personal, what they put into their poems—and what they get out of them—is universal: the defining work of finding one’s voice.

Winner of seventeen film festival prizes, including eleven audience awards, Louder Than a Bomb was hailed as "one of the top ten documentaries of 2011" by Roger Ebert, and received a perfect 100% rating on rottentomatoes.com. The film received the 2011 Humanitas Prize for documentaries and was chosen that year for the American Documentary Showcase, created by the U.S. State Department to “cultivate greater understanding among people around the world”. Louder Than a Bomb had its television premiere in January 2012 as part of the Oprah Winfrey Network’s “OWN Documentary Club", and is now available on DVD.

Credits

co-director/co-producers: Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel
director of photography: Stephan Mazurek
editor: John Farbrother