Louder Than A Bomb

Directors/Producers: Greg Jacobs, Jon Siskel
Category: Education; Popular Culture
Total Running Time: 97 min.
Release Date: 2010
Website: http://louderthanabombfilm.com

Synopsis

Louder Than a Bomb features four Chicago high school poetry teams as they prepare for and compete in the world's largest youth poetry slam. By turns hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures their tempestuous lives, exploring the ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa. Louder Than a Bomb is about language as a joyful release, irrepressibly talented teenagers obsessed with making words dance, and the communities they create along the way.

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.

Trailer

About the Filmmakers

Siskel-Jacobs Productions co-founder GREG JACOBS served as vice president and chief creative officer at Towers Productions, where he oversaw the content of more than 200 documentaries on five different networks, including award-winning shows and series for A&E, History, Discovery, The Weather Channel, and CNN. A graduate of Yale University, Jacobs has a master's degree in history from Ohio State, and is the author of Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools.

Siskel-Jacobs Productions co-founder JON SISKEL was executive producer and co-creator of the series Fake Out, which ran for two seasons on Court TV. He has also produced shows for the A&E series American Justice, Investigative Reports and Biography, and his work has been shown on The Travel Channel, Discovery and History. Siskel serves on the board of directors of Free Spirit Media, a Chicago-based youth media organization, as well as the Gene Siskel Film Center.