To Be Heard

Check your cynicism at the ticket booth. To Be Heard is one of the best documentaries of the year.

In the end, the power poetry workshops, as the teachers are first to admit, are not about creating Shakespeares. They are about survival.

For how well this finely crafted work captures the pressures of inner-city poverty, single-parent families and abusive relationships, one of its strengths lies in its ability to also gracefully locate the drama in filling out a college application.

This brisk but full documentary about students at a Bronx high school taking a class that promotes literacy and poetry slams is, like its subjects, multifaceted, sometimes sad but ultimately inspiring.

However uplifting, To Be Heard, shot over the course of several years, takes a surprisingly unflinching look at the home lives of the three high schoolers.

This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.

Spanning four years, To Be Heard has a large enough scope to map its subjects' rocky road to reinvention, concentrating on various bumps along the way.