In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Strand Theatre will host two special screenings of LOUDER THAN A BOMB – a film about passion, competition, teamwork, and trust. It’s about the joy of being young, and the pain of growing up. It’s about speaking out, making noise, and finding your voice.
It also just happens to be about poetry.
Every year, more than six hundred teenagers from over sixty Chicago area schools gather for the world’s largest youth poetry slam, a competition known as "Louder Than a Bomb". This new documentary chronicles the stereotype-confounding stories of four teams as they prepare for and compete in the 2008 event. By turns hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures the tempestuous lives of these unforgettable kids, exploring the ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa. This is not "high school poetry" as we often think of it. This is language as a joyful release, irrepressibly talented teenagers obsessed with making words dance. How and why they do it—and the community they create along the way—is the story at the heart of this inspiring film.
Winner of eleven film festival prizes, including seven audience awards, the film has been selected for the 2011 American Documentary Showcase and will have its television premiere later this year as part of the Oprah Winfrey Network’s “OWN Documentary Club.”
"An affecting and superbly paced celebration of American youth at their creative best..." Robert Koehler, Variety
"Fascinating...Inspiring..." Susan King, LA Times
