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Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival)

Directed by: Roland Legiardi-Laura, Edwin Martinez, Deborah Shaffer and Amy Sultan
Featuring: Anthony Pittman, Karina Sanchez, Pearl Quick, Roland Legiardi-Laura and Amy Sultan

“To Be Heard” introduces us to three high-school-age New York City poets battling adolescence and their societal situations, each of whom finds solace and strength in the spoken word taught by a program called Power Writers.

The South Bronx trio of teens — Karina, Anthony and Pearl — take the directors and their cameras into their neighborhoods, and into their loves and fears, resulting in a sharing of four years of their lives with the audience. “To Be Heard” amounts not only to an introduction into an important educational and experiential program, but to an experience in viewing at-risk youth graduate in close-up as they tackle their hopes and dreams, their realities and socio-economic confines.

Sometimes bearing witness to one’s own life as it continues to cultivate with the presence of a camera burdens the individual with the external pressures of having something to prove and a fictional someone to whom to prove it. However, in “To Be Heard,” it never seems that the filmmakers are challenging their subjects with the threat of the permanence of footage.

The filmmakers, though, are more than just filmmakers. Legiardi-Laura is one of the directors of a New York institution, The Nuyorican Poets Café, and runs the Power Writers program with co-director Amy Sultan. The devotion of these filmmakers, mentors in front of and behind the cameras, provides a ballast point with which the audience can find their own emotions cresting and coasting. Of the two other directors credited on the film, Shaffer has earned props over the years directing Cannes, Sundance and New York Film Festivaldocumentary titles, and “To Be Heard” represents Martinez’s first feature-length documentary.

The verite style of the filmmaking refuses to massage the footage and over time reveals the subjects’ true realities, egos, compulsions and confidences. The considerable devotion of time to these talented children living on the fringes of surefootedness and fragility translates to the filmmakers capturing true moments of maddening uncertainty.

As we bear witness to three lives paused from progressing to their potential, then unleashed and bound and set free and conquered and vanquished and vindicated, our hearts, too, feel the power.

For more information on the film and the Power Writers Program, visit www.powerpoetry.org

Photo: Pearl Quick’s bedroom wall — quotes and fears — in “To Be Heard”; photo courtesy the Seattle International Film Festival