Patricia Aufderheide, American University
The U.S. documentary production house Kartemquin Films, launched in 1966 and still going strong, has an amazing, improbable history. This pioneering institution has made films that broke and set molds. Kartemquin won one of the first MacArthur Foundation’s infrastructure grants for media nonprofits, and a 2019 Peabody institutional award for “its commitment to unflinching documentary filmmaking and telling an American history rooted in social justice and the stories of the marginalized.” It’s produced films as different as Hoop Dreams, Minding the Gap, Vietnam Long Time Coming, Eating Up Easter, Unapologetic, and ’63 Boycott—all of which won major awards. Its films have been seen on PBS, NBC, A&E, Al Jazeera America, and Hulu. It’s been a collective, a production house, a media arts center. Its filmmakers use vastly different approaches. And it’s been instrumental in U.S. media policy, from the creation of public TV’s Independent Television Service to public access TV to filmmakers’ employment of fair use.
What’s the common thread? As I found out by researching my new book Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, everything Kartemquin undertakes is driven by the notion that documentaries can serve democracy. The founders were as inspired by the open possibilities of cinéma vérité as they were by the progressive democratic theory of John Dewey. They committed to compassionate, intimate storytelling about people caught up in large systemic problems. And they saw themselves both as artists and as members of different publics, including a filmmaking public. That focus helped them reject political sectarianism in the 1970s, sappy sentimentalism in the 1990s, and cheap sensationalism today. Below is an illustrative selection of the documentaries that Kartemquin Films have produced.

The Chicago Maternity Center Story (Jerry Blumenthal, Suzanne Davenport, Sharon Karp, Gordon Quinn, Jennifer Rohrer with other members of the collective), 1976, 60 minutes)
A great example of Kartemquin’s early work, when a collective worked with activist organizations in Chicago to produce films useful to social movements. For years, feminist activists supported efforts to keep the highly-rated home birthing service, the Chicago Maternity Center, open.The film was completed after the center was closed, but was used widely in feminist movement circles. The film analyzed the capitalist forces of medicine, prioritizing hospital stays offering more opportunities to add costs, in the context of a cinéma vérité portrait of a woman who used the service for the birth of her son. The film was restored in 2010 thanks to a prestigious National Film Preservation Foundation grant, in recognition of its significance in documentary history.
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The Last Pullman Car (Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn, 1983, 54 minutes)
After the collective amicably dissolved, cofounder Gordon Quinn and his colleague and friend Jerry Blumenthal, an early Kartemquinite, continued to work with unions in the Chicago area’s many unionized manufacturing businesses. Pullman factory workers’ jobs were threatened by corporate takeover and closure, after years of management disinvestment. The Last Pullman Car follows their organizing, including bitter conflicts between the local and Steelworkers union officials, as it also retraces the industrial history that got them to that point. It is now a landmark labor film about globalization, industrial unionism, and neoliberal economics.
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Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
Hoop Dreams, made over seven years, tracked two young Chicago basketball hopefuls from middle school to college, and in the process chronicled the costs to two Black working families of supporting their kids’ all-American dreams. Steve James’ debut film, it could not have been made without Kartemquin keeping it alive for months and years at a time. After it was accepted for the Sundance Film Festival, the famous TV film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel heralded it as a breakthrough. To everyone at Kartemquin’s surprise, it became a hit and the most lucrative documentary of its kind in history. After a theatrical run, it showed on PBS. Everyone who spoke onscreen was given a piece of the royalties, most importantly the two men whose childhood had been chronicled; royalties are still being issued. Hoop Dreams changed the industry’s expectations for what kinds of documentaries could succeed in the marketplace.
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The New Americans (Executive producers Steve James and Gordon Quinn, seven programs, 411 minutes, 2003)
The success of Hoop Dreams drew more people who wanted to tell character-driven, socially meaningful work to Kartemquin. At a time when independent documentary series were almost unheard of, Kartemquin built a team and won grant funding to make a seven-part series about immigration. Launching with visits to families still in their home countries (so that viewers could meet them when they were still surrounded by families, friends and familiar context), the filmmakers wove together stories of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, Nigeria and Palestine. The series made viewing history at PBS, and training modules generated separately from the raw materials were prepared for and with policymakers, social workers, and immigration officials.
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’63 Boycott (Gordon Quinn, 2017, 31 minutes)
In 1963, Gordon Quinn was a student at the University of Chicago when he captured some footage of a massive one-day student strike by Chicago students and parents of color, protesting a white supremacist school board leader and his policies. In 2017, in the midst of new organizing by students, teachers and parents of color, he and the Kartemquin team found and interviewed some of the same people in the 1963 footage, and juxtaposed that movement with today’s. Shortlisted for the Academy Awards, it has been used in organizing and in schools. Producer Rachel Dickson went on to work with Kevin Shaw, another Kartmequin alum, who made the powerful feature documentary Let the Little Light Shine about people of color fighting for a highly-rated, predominantly BIPOC school to stay open.
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Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018, 93 minutes)
One of the innovations of the Kartemquin that emerged from the MacArthur Foundation’s infrastructure grant was, from 2007 onward, a variety of special programs. The largest is the Diverse Voices in Documentaries initiative, done with the Community Film Workshop. This selects aspiring filmmakers whose stories can diversify the storytelling environment. One of those was Bing Liu, a Chicago-area filmmaker whose story of working-class young men at loose ends and at the tail end of their heedless years as skateboarders became an Academy Award nominee.
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Unapologetic (Ashley O’Shay, 2020, 86 minutes)
Ashley O’Shay is alumna of three Kartemquin programs: internship, the Diverse Voices in Documentary, and also a start-up grant. Unapologetic, made in the turmoil of the racial reckoning organizing, features the stories of two very different women organizing in the Movement for Black Lives in Chicago.
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Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. There, she founded the organization now known as the Center for Media & Social Impact, where she continues as Senior Research Fellow. Her books include Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy (University of California), Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago), with Peter Jaszi; Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press), and Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press). She has been a Fulbright Research Fellow in Brazil (1994-5), Australia (2017), and South Korea (2024). She is also a John Simon Guggenheim fellow (1994) and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival among others. Aufderheide has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards, including the George Stoney award for service to documentary from the University Film and Video Association in 2015, the International Communication Association’s 2010 for Communication Research as an Agent of Change Award, Woman of Vision award from Women in Film and Video (DC) in 2010, a career achievement award in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association and the Scholarship and Preservation Award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association.