News

Please note that the following article contains graphic imagery.Incident.Bill Morrison’s Incident (2023) opens with a god’s-eye view of the world. A Google Maps rendering of planet Earth floats in space with an icon of crosshairs overlaid. We briskly descend on North America, zooming into Chicago, the South Shore neighborhood, and finally, 2020 East 71st Street—the exact location of Harith “Snoop” Augustus’s death. On July 14, 2018, the 37-year-old barber was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer while dozens of cameras passively recorded what took place. Despite such extensive police bodycam and CCTV footage, the truth about Harith Augustus’s death and its aftermath remained unclear for months. Weaving footage from various sources into a split-screen reconstruction of the shooting, Morrison’s Oscar-nominated short documentary provides vital answers about what happened that day, but in the process, it raises bigger questions about the limits of representation. If...

All These Sons, a new documentary from Bing Liu and Joshua Altman, is likely to remind you of documentaries you’ve seen before, which is part of its simultaneously tragic and hopeful point.

Documentaries about gun violence in Chicago — the human toll and the people committed to trying to find solutions — are almost a cottage industry, and All These Sons plays as a follow-up to Steve James’ The Interrupters and as a parallel project to James’ recent City So Real, with the 2018 Jason Van Dyke trial featuring in each. It’s basically a sequel to Coodie and Chike’s Benji, one of the ...

All These Sons, a new documentary from Bing Liu and Joshua Altman, is likely to remind you of documentaries you’ve seen before, which is part of its simultaneously tragic and hopeful point.

Documentaries about gun violence in Chicago — the human toll and the people committed to trying to find solutions — are almost a cottage industry, and All These Sons plays as a follow-up to Steve James’ The Interrupters and as a parallel project to James’ recent City So Real, with the 2018 Jason Van Dyke trial featuring in each. It’s basically a sequel to Coodie and Chike’s Benji, one of the ...

The president of the United States has nominated an old friend with a track record of cruelty to an ambassadorship. Unfortunately, we’re no longer talking about Trump.

President Biden will announce later this month that he is nominating Rahm Emanuel to be the new U.S. ambassador to Japan, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The news isn’t surprising. It became clear soon after Biden took office that he was gearing up to give the former Obama chief of staff a marquee ambassadorship. It now looks like he...

Long before Kanye West tardily disrupted the 2020 presidential election, the pioneering force in American hip-hop put himself smack in the middle of Chicago’s crowded 2019 mayoral race. West endorsed candidate Amara Enyia at a “pop-up” rally, standing quietly next to fellow supporter Chance the Rapper and behind their progressive candidate as she spoke to a small crowd from the sidewalk. These celebrity endorsements were meant to help boost awareness, but even then, questions were asked if West’s support of Donald Trump would negatively effect the young, Black candidate’s attempts to court Black voters.

And Steve James was there.

Before the GOP’s attack on voting, including inflated claims of voter fraud and the outright theft of people’s ballots, delegates for Chicago mayoral candidates sat around a computer and made knowingly false claims to try to boot their opponents from the ballot entirely. Lawyers cited mistakes on pages that didn’t exist,...

Dickens had the teeming streets of Victorian-era London, Balzac had Paris during the Bourbon Restoration period, and Steve James has 21st century Chicago. A key part of the team behind the groundbreaking Hoop Dreams, this veteran documentarian has dabbled over the years in everything from biopics (Prefontaine) to bigger-picture looks at social ills (Abacus: Small Enough to Jail). It’s the City of Broad Shoulders, however, that’s provided him with a creative home base via Kartemquin Films and a subject rich enough to examine in depth. Every U.S.

When confronted by the press about Chicago’s overwhelming political corruption, city politicians often shrug and curtly concede: “That’s Chicago politics.” The city’s corruption is so native and unyielding that it just “is what it is,” has been and always will be. In Steve James’ five-part docuseries City So Real, a buoyant portrait of Chicago loosely wrapped around the 2019 mayoral election and the murder trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, the city’s denizens justify an array of their problems with that same self-referential and self-enabling sentiment, “That’s just Chicago for you.” But the city’s 2019 mayoral election saw […]

The post "Hey Lori, Do You Mind If We Put a Mic on You Today?": Steve James on City So Real first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When confronted by the press about Chicago’s overwhelming political corruption, city politicians often shrug and curtly concede: “That’s Chicago politics.” The city’s corruption is so native and unyielding that it just “is what it is,” has been and always will be. In Steve James’ five-part docuseries City So Real, a buoyant portrait of Chicago loosely wrapped around the 2019 mayoral election and the murder trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, the city’s denizens justify an array of their problems with that same self-referential and self-enabling sentiment, “That’s just Chicago for you.” But the city’s 2019 mayoral election saw […]

The post "Hey Lori, Do You Mind If We Put a Mic on You Today?": Steve James on City So Real first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Chicago is the subject of “City So Real,” a sweeping epic five-part documentary series by Oscar nominee Steve James premiering commercial free on NatGeo on Oct. 29.

Chicago is the third biggest city in the U.S. with its rich cultural diversity divided into 77 distinct neighborhoods including Bucktown, Pilsen, Lincoln Park, Goose Island, River West and South Loop. And its pizza is considered the best or one of the best in the country. But the Windy City has been marred by corruption for the years-its politics are often referred to as a “blood sport.” And the city has been gripped by so much gun violence that the it’s been labeled the “murder capital” of America.

The metropolis is at the crossroads when “City So Real” opens in the summer of 2018. Mayor Rahm Emanuel finds himself increasingly unpopular due his handling and perceived cover-up of the shocking killing of a young African American teenager,...