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The National Poetry Slam will celebrate the next generation of poets with a special screening of the award-winning youth slam documentary Louder Than a Bomb on Friday, August 12 at The Brattle Theatre. The screening will be co-sponsored by Mass LEAP, a brand-new youth poetry non-profit serving the Greater Boston area. The screening will be one of the last events at this year’s National Poetry Slam, which runs from August 9-13.
“We're thrilled that Louder Than a Bomb will be screening at the 2011 National Poetry Slam,” says co-director Greg Jacobs. “The adult poets who serve as teachers, mentors, and emcees at LTAB every year are inspirations to the kids who participate. Through the film, we hope in some small way to help the kids return the favor.”
Louder Than a Bomb tells the inspirational story of four Chicago High School slam teams as they prepare to compete in the annual competition of the same name. Adult viewers thinking back to their own high school efforts at poetry will be pleasantly surprised at the talent and passion evident in the youth poetry scene: 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.
“Being featured in the Louder Than A Bomb documentary has been one of the most humbling and profound experiences of my lifetime,” says Adam Gottlieb, a Chicago high school grad now attending college in New England. “It is most definitely surreal to have my senior year of high school framed in this way for audiences around the world.” The charismatic Gottlieb has since become familiar to Boston audiences as a member of the Hampshire College Slam Collective, and has competed at the National Poetry Slam itself. Speaking of the directors, he remarked that “Greg and Jon [Siskel] approached the project as true story-tellers, with full respect, honesty, and artistic integrity. They are not interested in dramatizing but in truth-telling.”
The film premiered at the 2010 Cleveland International Film Festival, where it won both the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for best film and the Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Film Competition. Since then, the film has won audience awards at the Palm Springs, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Woods Hole film festivals, as well as jury prizes at the Austin, Chicago, Woods Hole, and Virginia film fests. It’s been a huge hit with critics, too; Robert Koehler of Variety called it “an affecting and superbly paced celebration of American youth at their creative best.”
The showing is also something of a coming out party for Mass LEAP (Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance), a group that aims to create more opportunities for youth poets in the Greater Boston area through writing workshops, open mics, slams, poetry teacher training, and curriculum development courses.
“Louder Than a Bomb does a great job of showcasing the impact a vibrant spoken word community can have on the lives of teenagers from all backgrounds,” says Mass LEAP co-founder Jade Sylvan. “The National Poetry Slam is the perfect place to show this film, since it represents the coming together of the nationwide slam community.”
WHAT: A special screening of Louder Than a Bomb at the National Poetry Slam
WHERE: The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge
WHEN: Friday, August 12 at 11pm
COST: $10 or free with a festival pass. Festival passes can be purchased online.
About the National Poetry Slam
The National Poetry Slam (nps2011.com) is America's biggest team poetry slam. Held every year since 1990, it is the definitive showcase for competitive performance poetry. Billed as "the competitive art of performance poetry," Slam was invented in Chicago in July 1986 by construction worker-turned-poet Marc Smith. It is a fast-paced competition where poets have a limited amount of time to impress judges randomly selected from the audience. Storytelling, lyricism, and stand-up comedy all come together in what’s evolved to a modern oral tradition. This year, the 22nd annual National Poetry Slam will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, and expects to draw a record number of teams.
About Mass LEAP
Mass LEAP is a network of poets, teachers, and students working to create a vibrant youth poetry community in Massachusetts. Sponsored by Mass Poetry, it holds regular youth writing workshops, all-ages open mics and teen poetry slams, and trains poets and teachers in techniques to incorporate spoken word into the classroom.
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