by Ryan Macdonald

Fighting rush hour traffic, I headed to Seattle on Thursday, June 9 for the much anticipated documentary, To Be Heard at SIFF Cinema.

Anthony, Karina, and Pearl are high school students from The Bronx, an area of New York City where kids don’t have a lot of options growing up. As Anthony puts it at the beginning, “This city isn’t helping us do shit. They just give us a basketball and a gun, and say either shoot the basket or shoot each other.” The streets are rough, and home life isn’t much better. Too much responsibility, not a lot of understanding. Abuse, both verbal and physical. This is the same area highlighted in last year’s The Lottery, where a child’s chances at a good education were luck of the draw. But these kids actually have a fighting chance, and it comes in the form of a poetry class.

Power Writing, whose director Amy Sultan is also co-director of the film, is a program that teaches people of all ages to express themselves through writing and poetry. It is an informal, intimate, judgement-free environment where they can read their poems aloud, most of which are extremely personal. The teachers (among them co-director Roland Legiardi-Laura), are realists in that they understand the world these kids come from. This isn’t Dangerous Minds or The Principal (I know, I’m old…). This is real people who’ve seen kids get lost in the system, and they’re dedicated to saving as many as they can.

It’s tough to review a film about poetry. So much of it is the experience of sitting in the room, listening to the words. While the directors and cinematographer Edwin Martinez do a great job of documenting the struggles of these three kids (who refer to themselves as “the tripod”, a label of solidarity and loyalty), this effort in cinema verite rests completely on the audience’s absorption of these words. Karina’s poems about her violent mother. Pearl’s confessions of unrequited love. Anthony’s anger with and scrutiny of a system he refuses to let keep him down. Even if the technical aspects were faulty, which they aren’t, there is a constant feeling of intimacy without intrusion that allows us, almost forces us, to fall in love with all three teenagers. We are entranced by their ability to express fear, love, and anger. We are invested in their successes and failures. This is documentary in it’s purest form, and it will change you. Maybe not politically, socially, or philosophically, maybe not in a way that’s immediately apparent. But it will change you. This is the true test of a documentary, and To Be Heard succeeds.

These transformative words, however, would have little power without a proper context. The subjects allow the filmmakers almost uninhibited access to their lives, and the filmmakers take full advantage. The inclusion of a scene where Karina and Anthony are comparing mother-inflicted wounds, or Pearl showing us around her apartment, may seem innocuous or relatively trivial. But when they are referenced later in poetry, we see the effects these trivialities have. The choice to include everything possible in this film, wins and losses, rejections and acceptance, is a spectacularly effective one. The film’s effects on the audience were palpable, and I’ve never heard so many rounds of applause at a single screening.

Final Grade: A

Q&A

After the show, directors Amy Sultan and Roland Legiardi-Laura, cinematographer Edwin Martinez, Pearl Quick, and two producers from Seattle (Again, my apologies for not remembering names. This is why you review things in a timely manner…) took the stage to discuss the film. I had realized two minutes into the film that, when I entered the theater lobby, I had squeezed past all of them in my quest for a bathroom. So I was very happy to get the chance to actually hear them speak.

This nearly decade-long project was an intense labor of love that started with the directors, spread to two producers on the opposite side of the country, and culminated in the accomplishments of the subjects. It was great hearing about every stage of the film, and where the kids are now. But the greatest moment of the evening was when an audience member finally got up the courage to ask Pearl Quick to perform a poem. After so much applause, laughter, and candid questions and answers, you could have heard a pin drop in that room as Pearl launched into an emotionally charged poem called “War Drums”. Being able to see her in the film, starting out as a nervous, insecure teenager, and afterwards as a confident, empowered girl on her way to college was a special moment that I don’t think any of us will soon forget. Thanks so much to Pearl, SIFF, the filmmakers, and a great audience for making this screening my favorite at SIFF 2011.

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