STEVIE

Q&A with director Steve James

Next week, director Steve James visits STF.  Best known for HOOP DREAMS, Steve’s new film THE INTERRUPTERS (a strong Oscar contender) will be opening theatrically later this month. STF is proud to present his earlier work STEVIE that had the bad timing of opening in theaters the very week the Iraq War broke out.  Although critically acclaimed, many audiences have not yet had a chance to see it.  STEVIE marks the launch of a mini “Steve James festival” in New York - full details here.

“Brave…courageous and powerful…” - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“A gripping, startingly honest portrait…has all the heartstopping will-the-kid-make-it drama of Hoop Dreams.” - Karen Durbin, New York Times

“Stevie emerges painfully but profoundly as one of the most unusual, if not absolutely unique, efforts in the field of nonfiction filmmaking.” - Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer

In 1995, filmmaker Steve James returns to Pomona, a beautiful rural hamlet in Southern Illinois to reconnect with Stevie Fielding, for whom James once served as an advocate Big Brother. He finds that the once difficult, awkward child has become—ten years later—an angry and troubled young man. Part way through filming, Stevie is arrested and charged with a serious crime. He confesses to the crime and then later recants. The filmmaker himself is drawn into the film as he tries to sort out his own feelings, past and present, about Stevie and how to deal with him in the wake of his arrest. What was to be a modest profile of Stevie, turns into an intimate four and a half year chronicle of a dysfunctional family’s struggle to heal.

STEVIE is increasingly being recognized as a modern documentary masterpiece, gaining acclaim as one of the top 25 essential documentaries of the decade in a list by popular online critic Marilyn Ferdinand. The Sunday Morning Reviews ranked it at #19, calling Steve James “the best documentarian working today… to make Stevie and Hoop Dreams in one lifetime is an amazing feat.”

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