Vino Vérité: HOOP DREAMS
Schedule
Sun, 13 Apr, 2025 at 06:30 pm
UTC-05:00Location
FilmScene (at The Chauncey) | Iowa City, IA
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Presented byBread Garden Market and Little Village Magazine
With support from
University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communications
Sunday, April 13, 6:30pm
DIALOGUE: Filmmaker Steve James in person
The Vino Vérité series features talented new voices and established filmmakers influenced by the vérité tradition in person to present their thought-provoking, chance-taking, and visually-arresting films. Each selection is paired with hand-selected wines from Bread Garden Market.
Tickets: $25 public / $20 members / $12 students. Includes wine tasting, film, hors d'oeuvres and filmmaker reception.
6pm Hors d'oeuvres & wine tasting
6:30pm Screening
9:20pm Q&A + Reception with filmmaker, wine and dessert
"Two very enthusiastic thumbs up. The best film of the year."—Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert
"The most powerful movie about sports ever made."—The Washington Post
ABOUT HOOP DREAMS
Few movies have impacted both popular culture and the film industry on the same level as Steve James' Hoop Dreams. The film was originally planned as a 30-minute PBS project, but filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert saw a deeper story. The result is an epic tale of hope and heartbreak that sprawls over five years in the lives of two ordinary teens with extraordinary ambitions. Those two young men, Arthur Agee and William Gates, dare to dream of NBA stardom from the courts of inner-city Chicago.
Basketball is the medium in Hoop Dreams, but the American Dream is the message, and Hoop Dreams resonated with audiences across the country. The film stayed in theaters for nearly a year, becoming the highest grossing documentary film of all time, and changed public and industry perception about documentaries as cinematic viewing. Hoop Dreams was a cultural phenomenon, Snoop Dogg dropped a track titled "Hoop Dreams," and the film was added to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Even now, thirty years later, James' work still resonates as one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Steve James is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose previous work includes Academy Award nominated films Hoop Dreams and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Other award-winning work includes Stevie, The Interrupters, At the Death House Door, and Life Itself. His work has won numerous Emmy’s, two Independent Spirit Awards, two Peabody Awards, a Dupont Columbia Journalism Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Two recent docuseries, America to Me and City So Real, were among the most acclaimed TV shows of the years in which they aired. In 2023, ESPN aired his award-winning docuseries, The Luckiest Guy in the World, which IndieWire named one of the best documentaries of the year. His most recent film, A Compassionate Spy, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures in 2023.
Sundance Film Festival (1994) — World Premiere
Sundance Film Festival (1994) — Audience Award
Library of Congress (2005) — United States National Film Registry Designation
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Where is it happening?
FilmScene (at The Chauncey), 404 E College St.,Iowa City, Iowa, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
