Steve James Trailers
Life Itself TrailerThese Amazing Shadows TrailerHeartbeats Trailer
Steve James is an American film producer and director of several documentaries, including the award-winning Hoop Dreams and Stevie. He is also the director of the 1997 feature film Prefontaine. His newest film, The Interrupters, a portrayal of a year inside the lives of former gang members in Chicago who now intervene in violent conflicts, will be released in 2011 after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is his sixth feature length collaboration with his long-time filmmaking home, the non-profit Chicago production studio Kartemquin Films, and is also his fifth feature to be accepted into the Sundance Film Festival.
He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, studying with Charles Harpole. His work, he tells journalist Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life, was strongly influenced by the film Harlan County, USA.
There’ve been many documentaries over the years that have powerfully impacted me. I think this one came along at the time when I was more interested in being a feature filmmaker than a documentary filmmaker. So it came along at the beginning of a process of moving from an interest in feature film to documentaries, and that’s where my career has taken me. It came along at the right time for me. It helped me see, “Ah, this is more what I want to do.”
Steve James also pulls influence from the original definition of the term cinema verite as it applies to the Rouch/Morin method of filmmaking. Just as with Rouch and Morin, the “people on camera and we in the audience are continually reminded that a film is being made, that we are watching a film.” We are reminded of this through James’ presence on screen as well as his cinematic editing techniques, in order to obtain, what he believes is a more accurate depiction of truth.
Most Popular Steve James Trailers
Total trailers found: 28
31 August 2022
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.
04 July 2014
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 marriage, and his brave and transcendent battle with cancer.
12 September 1994
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St.
21 September 2012
Former football player and wrestler Chris Nowinski's quest to publicize recent findings about the often dire consequences of head concussions sustained by athletes in contact sports — injuries that have previously been considered momentary setbacks and ignored in the name of toughness and dedication to the team.
13 April 2010
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.
21 October 2014
Everyone’s talking about it, but who can explain it? Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions and Morgan Spurlock’s Cinelan have partnered to produce WE THE ECONOMY 20 Short Films You Can’t Afford to Miss.
17 August 2018
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.
06 January 2017
The incredible saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York.
03 September 2023
Set in 1964, a camera crew follows Willie Pep, retired featherweight boxing champion. Down and out in Hartford CT, married to a woman half his age and with a drug-addled son and mounting debts, Pep decides to make a return to the ring.
24 January 1997
It's the true-life story of legendary track star Steve Prefontaine, the exciting and sometimes controversial "James Dean of Track," whose spirit captured the heart of the nation! Cocky, charismatic, and tough, "Pre" was a running rebel who defied rules, pushed limits .
09 March 2008
An investigation of the wrongful death of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in Texas on December 7, 1989, after prosecutors ignored evidence inculpating a man, who bragged to friends about committing the crimes of which DeLuna was convicted.
21 November 2003
The New Americans follows a diverse group of immigrants and refugees as they leave their home and families behind and learn what it means to be new Americans in the 21st century.
17 August 2005
Former indie film "guru" John Pierson takes his family to Fiji for one year to run the world's most remote movie theater.
03 March 2002
True story of boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and their enduring friendship.
08 April 2015
This forty-minute program was produced by the Criterion Collection in 2014
29 July 2011
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.
21 February 1999
A true story of a priest (Andre Braugher) in New Orleans who formed a group of black players and challenged an all-white prep school basketball team in the 1960's.
02 March 2017
Edith and Eddie, ages 96 and 95, are America's oldest interracial newlyweds. Their unusual and idyllic love story is threatened by a family feud that triggers a devastating abuse of the legal guardianship system.
21 April 2022
When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.
09 September 2002
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.
15 November 1992
An educational companion piece to Hoop Dreams, Higher Goals features NBA star Isiah Thomas in a fast-paced, entertaining PBS special that encourages young athletes to put their dreams of professional sports in perspective and focus on getting an education.
01 October 2008
At 31, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick faces an impossible decision: remove her breasts and ovaries or risk incredible odds of developing cancer.
29 September 2010
Francis is a young gay man, Marie is a young straight woman and the two of them are best friends -- until the day the gorgeous Nicolas walks into a Montreal coffee shop.
06 April 2018
Two boys escape from slavery, spend a year in a rehabilitation shelter, and eventually reunite with their families.
01 January 1991
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, Roseland, Pilsen, Uptown, Rogers Park and Garfield Park.
12 November 2021
Declining participation leads two Milwaukee area high schools—one black and urban, the other white and suburban—to combine their football programs.
01 October 2012
Focus Forward: Short Films, Big Ideas is an award-winning series of 30 three-minute stories about innovators—people who are reshaping the world through act or invention—directed by the world's most celebrated documentary filmmakers.
22 January 2011
Tells the history and importance of The National Film Registry, a roll call of American cinema treasures that reflects the diversity of film, and indeed the American experience itself.
