Event

Hoop Dreams

Dec 19 - Dec 21

(Steve James, 1994, United States, DCP, 170 min)

20th anniversary screening!
New digital restoration!

Friday, Dec 19 at 07:00PM
Saturday, Dec 20 at 05:00PM
Sunday, Dec 21 at 05:00PM

Originally funded by PBS to be the half-hour "style wars" of street basketball, Hoop Dreams at twenty remains an invigorated, furious portrait of American racial imagination.

Roger Ebert said it best: Hoop Dreams' depiction of two high school ball players trying to make it in the prejudiced cauldron of Chicago in the '90s is "the great American documentary" (the Oscars snubbed it entirely).

James' vision of the pipeline of poor, black talent brings to mind the Windy City from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. In high school, black athletes are still cheap enough to treat like penny stocks, and we watch as two of them brave the ringer of all-white private schools, poverty and the constant risk of injury for a shot at a scholarship. In this America, all of us are entrepreneurs of race and markets, like freedom, are never free.