Movies: Kartemquin Films

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 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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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....

The Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, WI personifies cultural preservation, rural re-birth and the lineage of American graphic design. At Hamilton, international artisans meet retired craftsmen and together navigate the convergence of modern d...

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...

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

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....

Filmmaker Judith Helfand's searing investigation into the politics of “disaster” – by way of the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave, in which 739 residents perished (mostly Black and living in the city’s poorest neighborhoods)....

U.E. Wells follows an organizing drive by the United Electrical Workers Union at the Wells Foundry in Chicago. The multi-ethnic work force of Polish, Arab, Jewish, Hispanic and African American men and women unite together despite the company's effor...

Sonia Reich- who survived the Holocaust as a child by running and hiding, suddenly believes that she is being hunted again, 60 years later....

Unbroken Glass is a documentary about filmmaker Dinesh Sabu's journey to understand his parents, who died 20 years ago when he was six years old....

In the heart of the American Midwest, three women take on entrenched political systems in their fight to reshape local politics on their own terms....

A parish youth group in a lower middle-class Chicago neighborhood discusses parental authority, what growing up means and the difficulties of communicating with their parents....

At 31, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick faces an impossible decision: remove her breasts and ovaries or risk incredible odds of developing cancer. Armed with a genetic test result that leaves her vulnerable and confused, she balances dreams of having her own...