LOUDER THAN A BOMB Documentary Premieres 5/18

On May 18, 2011, the celebrated documentary LOUDER THAN A BOMB will debut theatrically nationwide via the distribution company Balcony Releasing. Winner of more than a dozen film festival prizes, including seven audience awards, LOUDER THAN A BOMB is nothing short of a celebration of American youth at their creative best.

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". Founded in 2001, "Louder Than a Bomb" is the only event of its kind in the country-a youth poetry slam built from the beginning around teams. Rather than emphasize individual poets and performances, the structure of "Louder Than a Bomb" demands that kids work collaboratively with their peers, presenting, critiquing, and rewriting their pieces. To succeed, teams have to create an  environment of mutual trust and support. For many kids, being a part of such an environment-in an academic context-is life-changing.

Directed and produced by Greg Jacobs and John Siskel (nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel), LOUDER THAN A BOMB 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.

LOUDER THAN A BOMB 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, Salem, and Woods Hole film festivals, as well as jury prizes at the Austin, Chicago, Woods Hole, and Virginia film fests, and been screened for more than 5000 high school students. LOUDER THAN A BOMB has been selected for the 2011 American Documentary Showcase, which was created by the U.S. State Department to "cultivate greater understanding among people around the world." Following its US theatrical release starting on May 18, 2011, the film will have its television premiere later this year as part of the Oprah Winfrey Network's "OWN Documentary Club."

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