Louder Than a Bomb Screens at Cotuit Center for the Arts

By: iO Staff, May 16, 2012

SISKEL/JACOBS PRODUCTIONS - Chicago teens perform during Louder Than a Bomb, the world's largest youth poetry slam.

Cotuit Center for the Arts, in partnership with the Woods Hole Film Festival, presents Louder Than A Bomb, an award-winning 2010 documentary about a high school poetry slam competition in the Chicago area.

Directed by Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs, Louder Than A Bomb is a film about passion, competition, teamwork, and trust. It is about the joy of being young, and the pain of growing up. It is about speaking out, making noise and finding one’s voice. Oh yeah, and it's about modern poetry, too.

The film follows four high school poetry teams as they prepare for the world’s largest youth poetry slam, a collaborative competition known as Louder Than A Bomb. tEvery year, more than 600 teenagers from more than 60 Chicago area high schools gather for the event.

The competition requires the teens to work with their peers, presenting, critiquing, and rewriting their pieces. To succeed, teams must create an environment of mutual trust and support. For many teenagers, being a part of such an environment is life-changing.

Louder Than A Bomb is about language as a joyful release and 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, are universal.

The next film in the “Best of the Fest” series is “Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology” by Tiffany Shlain, on Tuesday, June 19, at 7 PM.