Candid Camera

Nonprofit group, known for tackling complex issues on film, is honored with MacArthur award

Immigrants from five countries who struggle to adapt to America. Mothers in the 1950s and 60s who were told by doctors

that their “cold” personalities led to their children’s autism. Siblings worried about stability as their urban neighborhood becomes gentrified. All are real-life stories captured in movies produced by Kartemquin Educational Films.

Over the past 40 years, the Chicago organization has produced more than 30 award-winning documentaries that have been shown on television and in theaters. Started by three friends who attended the University of Chicago, the nonprofit group’s films tackle complex issues with no easy answers. To broaden each film’s impact, Kartemquin works with other organizations to produce educational materials and events where people can discuss their films after viewing them.

“We don’t make them just to show them on public television or to get them into theaters, and then people see them and they get reviews and that is the end of it,” says Gordon Quinn, the group’s president and a co-founder. “We make the film so people can learn something, become connected to people, and talk about it.”

Kartemquin — the name blends the three founders’ last names — is poised to become more talked about itself. The film group, whose efforts include the widely acclaimed 1994 basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, is among the eight winners of the 2007 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award for creative and effective institutions. The awards, which range from $350,000 to $500,000 this year, are given to national and international organizations with annual budgets of less than $2.5-million. To be eligible for the award, nonprofit groups must have previously received a grant from MacArthur.

The Chicago foundation, which awarded $235-million last year, has supported Kartemquin’s work for more than a decade.

“They bring visibility to issues we care about,” says Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. “They are very thoughtful, very provocative, and very fair.”

Telling Stories

Mr. Quinn grew up in suburban Arlington, Va. — which he recalls as “the most boring place in the world” — and found his niche among the members of Doc Films, a student club at the University of Chicago.

There, the philosophy and literature major organized documentary-film series and wrote his senior thesis on how cinéma vérité — a film style that shows life unfolding without a film crew’s interference — influences a democracy.

“I was already thinking about the role documentary filmmakers can play in giving voice to people who don’t have a voice, in telling stories about things people don’t generally see,” he says.

Upon graduation Mr. Quinn became a cameraman and formed a commercial film company with two friends, Stan Karter and Gerald Temaner. Their first project, Home for Life, depicted two elderly people adjusting to life inside a home for the aged.

“They love me at liberal-arts colleges,” says Mr. Quinn, 64, who also wears the hats of producer and director on some films. “What I studied was the best preparation for what I do. What I learned was storytelling.”

Mr. Karter and Mr. Temaner left Kartemquin a few years after it started. Mr. Quinn, who remains friendly with the pair, says economics played a role — the group didn’t make much money and Mr. Kartemquin had a family to support. (Mr. Quinn acknowledges Kartemquin is “not a good name” since it’s awkward to pronounce and hard to remember, but still, he never changed it.)

In the four decades of its existence, the group has spun through several iterations but it has never lost its focus on social change, says Mr. Quinn. In the 1970s, Kartemquin added a nonprofit arm and became a collective that produced films designed to have a social or political impact. During that period, films included the 21-minute Trick Bag, made in conjunction with the organization Rising Up Angry, which wanted to help children in gangs move away from violence, and The Chicago Maternity Center Story, about a group of women fighting to keep available a program that allowed expectant women to deliver their babies at home.

“The stories they want to do, they can’t live without telling those stories,” says Sandra J. Ruch, executive director of the International Documentary Association, in Los Angeles. “They are deeply involved with the issues and they want to do a very substantive job, and they do.”

To make a film with Kartemquin, which has a budget of $1.3-million this year, a filmmaker needs a passionate attachment to an idea — but not necessarily any experience in making films, says Mr. Quinn.

J.J. Hanley had no background producing or writing movies, but she convinced the group to take on Refrigerator Mothers, a 2003 film that was broadcast on public television, about how doctors once blamed mothers for their children’s autism. Many movies begin with a filmmaker’s personal experience; Ms. Hanley has an autistic son and was told by a doctor that her mothering style was contributing to her son’s isolating behavior.

In addition, the group is attracted to projects that don’t show life and its issues in black and white. “In America now, particularly the way the news media has gone, everything becomes immediately polarized,” says Mr. Quinn. “All the complexity and nuance of real life is squeezed out of any public dialogue and one of the things we are trying to do is put back in that human element.”

Nothing but Net

The turning point for the organization came in 1994, when it produced the surprise hit Hoop Dreams. The film, which won a slew of prizes, including the audience award for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles nearly five years in the lives of William Gates and Arthur Agee, two Chicago inner-city teenagers with basketball talent who pursue their dream of turning pro despite a swirl of outside pressures.

The success of Hoop Dreams — the sole Kartemquin film to have a lengthy commercial run — opened Mr. Quinn’s eyes to the value of reaching the largest audience possible.

“Hoop Dreams is a movie where a lot of people spent three hours with inner-city families that would never watch a movie about inner-city families,” he says. “They saw their complexity and their contradictions and they saw they were very much like them.”

However, the several hundred thousand dollars that Kartemquin earned from the movie also gave the group freedom to pursue harder-to-support projects, including Stevie, another movie by Hoop Dreams’ director, Steve James.

Stevie depicts the wayward path of Stevie Fielding, to whom Mr. James had once been a Big Brother. Halfway through filming what was initially a personal story of the filmmaker’s guilt at abandoning his troubled charge, Mr. Fielding was accused of molesting his 8-year-old niece. The resulting movie, says Mr. Quinn, is not about guilt or innocence but about seeing Mr. Fielding “as a human being and at the same time not letting him off the hook for what he did.”

In addition to reaping monetary rewards, Hoop Dreams had wide-reaching impact. Kartemquin worked with the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, in Boston, to develop and distribute educational materials about the issues the film raises. A teacher’s guide and a student’s guide are still available at no cost on Kartemquin’s Web site, and in 2008 the group plans to re-release the half-hour companion film, Hoop Dreams, Higher Goals, which was made for educators.

In addition, Susie Kay, a veteran teacher in inner-city Washington schools, approached the filmmakers about using the movie’s name for a new group she was then starting. In the past decade, the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund has raised $3-million to help send 800 D.C. schoolchildren to college and has linked 1,000 students with adult mentors who help prepare them for the experience.

“The movie changed the direction of my life,” says Ms. Kay, who now runs the charity full time. Seeing the film, she says, helped prompt her to decide, “I’m going to go out and raise money on behalf of my kids.”

Immigrants’ Tales

Hoop Dreams also indirectly gave rise to Kartemquin’s most ambitious project, The New Americans, a seven-hour series focused on families from five countries, which was broadcast on public television in 2004. Mr. James conceived the project after chatting with numerous immigrant cab drivers on his way to film festivals. The series followed people in their homelands for two years, then chronicled their move to America for several more. The series’ goal was to have viewers “actually see who these people are, and come to terms with them in a more complicated way, not just as abstractions,” says Mr. Quinn.

At the same time filming began, Kartemquin reached out to several groups to help develop material, including shorter segments of the films, and events around the series that would widen its impact. One of the groups, Active Voice, an organization in San Francisco that uses film and other media to help change attitudes, worked in places around the country where new immigrants were arriving. Screenings and other activities were used to educate longtime residents about the struggles of moving to a new country and to encourage immigrants to become more involved in the civic affairs of the towns and cities where they settled.

“Films don’t do anything on their own,” says Ellen Schneider, Active Voice’s founder. “They are effective when they are integrated into a broader strategy. If we expect a film to change the world, we are asking for too much and we are going to be disappointed.”

An evaluation of the charity’s programs by the Association for the Study and Development of Community, in Gaithersburg, Md., gave high marks to Active Voices’ efforts but cautioned that one group could not use the materials effectively because the series was not available in Spanish.

Last year the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, in Chicago, gave Kartemquin a grant for $10,000, part of which will be used to add a Spanish-language track to the series when it comes out on DVD.

Reinvention Time

The MacArthur award of $500,000 comes at a fortunate time for Kartemquin, which is in another of its “reinvention” periods, says Mr. Quinn. Aside from shepherding twice as many projects as usual — five, plus one co-production — the group recently completed plans for an organizational overhaul, which closed down its for-profit arm and strengthened its nonprofit mission. As part of the plan, the group doubled the size of its board, recruiting new members who had expertise outside filmmaking.

Also on Kartemquin’s to-do list is raising more money, so the group can embark on a film project without waiting first for the funds to come through.

“Kartemquin has been around for 40 years, and we want to be around for 40 more,” says Stephen H. Whisnant, the group’s board chairman and a vice president at Venture Philanthropy Partners, in Washington. “We have to find a way to tap into the hearts and minds and pocketbooks of people who think these stories are so critical.”

The MacArthur windfall will be used in part to start a fellows program, an effort to increase the group’s diversity. The program details are still being worked out, but Kartemquin will offer a filmmaker who is a member of a minority group the resources to develop a project for at least six months without the distraction of holding another job.

Some of the money will also be used to put all of Kartemquin’s movies on DVD to help make them accessible to more people and earn revenue from their distribution.

A portion of the award will help hire a new executive director, so Mr. Quinn can spend more time on his creative pursuits.

Recently Mr. Quinn did some camera work for Joanna Rudnick’s first film, In the Family, about the choices that women like herself face when they discover they are carriers of a hereditary breast-cancer and ovarian-cancer gene mutuation, which gives them an extremely high risk of developing both diseases. Ms. Rudnick is also Kartemquin’s director of development.

The topic of her documentary, like many others Mr. Quinn has worked on, can be heartrending, but what he takes away from the films is something positive.

“I have been shooting a scene and trying to wipe tears out of my eyes at the same time I am looking through the camera,” he says. “I don’t consider those bad experiences. That is when you feel most fully alive.”