Movies: Kartemquin Films

Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship....

The surprising and entertaining life of renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert (1942-2013): his early days as a freewheeling bachelor and Pulitzer Prize winner, his famously contentious partnership with Gene Siskel, his life-altering...

Physicist Ted Hall is recruited to join the Manhattan Project as a teenager and goes to Los Alamos with no idea what he'll be working on. When he learns the true nature of the weapon being designed, he fears the post-war risk of a nuclear holocaust a...

Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of i...

Three homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future....

The incredible saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York. Accused of mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Abacus becomes the only U.S. bank to face criminal charge...

Takes audiences behind the scenes of the new golden age of children’s picture books —a time when all children can see characters who look like them on the page; a time when creators come from diverse communities and backgrounds; and a time when inste...

Director Steve James returns to his home town of Hampton, Virginia to tell the story of how the trial of a young basketball star left a city divided....

Van Jones navigates increasingly tense and isolating political and racial divides in his attempt to become a “bridge builder” during the Trump administration....

Two nuns travel across Chicago asking people the question, "Are you happy?"...

The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters — former gang members who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once caused....

In 1995 Director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) returned to rural Southern Illinois to reconnect with Stevie Fielding, a troubled young boy he had been an 'Advocate Big Brother' to ten years earlier....

A documentary about neighborhood people creating change. Produced for the MacArthur Foundation by Kartemquin Films, this piece features six vignettes on community organizing in different Chicago neighborhoods: LeClaire Courts, Marquette Park, Roselan...

Brash boxer Cassius Clay burst into the American consciousness in the early 1960s, just ahead of the Civil Rights movement. His transformation into the spiritually enlightened heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali is legendary, but this religious awakeni...

Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old Chinese student, comes to the U.S. to study. In her detailed and beautiful diaries, the aspiring young scientist and teacher is full of optimism, hoping to also be married and a mother someday. Within weeks of her arriva...

In a time when the world needs greater cross-cultural understanding, WUHAN WUHAN is an invaluable depiction of a metropolis joining together to overcome a crisis....

During the Great Recession, joblessness exceeds 20 percent east of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. City of Trees follows the intimate stories of Charles, Michael and James, three long-term unemployed residents struggling to gain employment thr...

In this cinema-verite documentary, a teenage youth group called Thumbs Down decides "to bring Christ to their neighborhood" by holding an anti-war Mass at their conservative Chicago parish. Neither militants nor hippies, they simply believe that Chri...

Striking students meet at a "Revolutionary Seminar" at the Art Institute of Chicago in response to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of protesting students at Kent and Jackson State Universities....

Taylor Chain I tells the gritty realities of a seven-week strike at a small Indiana chain factory during 1973-74. Volatile union meetings and tension-filled interactions on the picket line provide an inside view of the tensions and conflicts inherent...