30th Anniversary Screening! First exhibited at the 1994 Sundance, where it won the audience award for best documentary, HOOP DREAMS! Febraury 24. 7pm. $8. 1624 E 7th Ave.
“The great American documentary… The best film of the 1990’s” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Two ordinary inner-city Chicago kids dare to reach for the impossible—professional basketball glory—in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, Hoop Dreams, by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates and their families as the boys navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while dealing with the intense pressures of their home lives and neighborhoods. This revelatory film continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema. “At its center, we wanted the film to be warm and emotional,” says producer Peter Gilbert. “We want people to see these families as going through some very rough times, overcoming a lot of obstacles, and rising above some of the typical media stereotypes that people have about inner-city families.”
What emerges from Hoop Dreams is far more than a sympathetic portrait of two black teenagers reaching for the stars. While remaining epic in scope, it manages to be intimate in detail, chronicling the universal process of growing up, coming of age, the love and conflict between fathers and sons, brothers, best friends and spouses.
It’s about success and failure not just on the court, but in school, at home, and ultimately, in society. And it does it in a way that no other film on sports has done before: it gives viewers an intimate look at the pursuit of the basketball dream while it is actually happening. Hoop Dreams won every major critics award in 1994 as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1995. The film earned Steve James the Directors Guild of America Award and the MTV Movie Award’s “Best New Filmmaker.” Hoop Dreams was subsequently named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, signifying its enduring importance to the history of American film, and has often been voted the greatest documentary of all time
