Leon Golub was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, and his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively.
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.
Usama Alshaibi is an Iraqi-American independent filmmaker and visual artist.
Steve James is an American film producer and director of several documentaries, including Hoop Dreams (1994), Stevie (2002), The Interrupters (2011), Life Itself (2014), and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016).
François Miron is a French-Canadian experimental filmmaker also working in documentary and fiction.
Kartemquin Films is a four-time Oscar-nominated 501(c)3 non-profit production company located in Chicago, Illinois, that produces a wide range of documentary films. It is the documentary filmmaking home of acclaimed producers such as Gordon Quinn, Steve James, Peter Gilbert, Maria Finitzo, Joanna Rudnick, Bing Liu, Aaron Wickenden, and Ashley O’Shay (Unapologetic).
The Battle Over Citizen Kane is a 1996 American documentary film directed and produced by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, from a screenplay by Lennon and Richard Ben Cramer, who also narrates. It chronicles the clash between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the production and release of Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane, which has been considered the greatest film ever made.
The Puppetmaster is a 1993 Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Based on the memoirs of Li Tian-lu, Taiwan's most celebrated puppeteer, this story covers the years from Li's birth in 1909 to the end of Japan's fifty-year occupation of Taiwan in 1945.
Gordon Quinn is artistic director and founding member of Kartemquin Films and a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Gordon Quinn has been making documentaries for over 45 years and has produced or directed over 30 films. His recent directing credits include Prisoner of Her Past and A Good Man. His producing credits include the films Hoop Dreams; In the Family;Vietnam, Long Time Coming; Golub: Late Works Are the Catastrophes; 5 Girls; Refrigerator Mothers; and Stevie. Most recently, Gordon executive produced Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita and The New Americans, for which he directed the Palestinian segment. Currently, he is executive producing several new films for Kartemquin.
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich is a 2000 French documentary film directed by Chris Marker, about and an homage to the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was an episode of the French documentary film series Cinéastes de notre temps, which in over ninety episodes since 1966 concentrates on individual film directors, film people and film movements. The title of the film is a play on the title of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Red Psalm is a 1972 Hungarian film by Miklós Jancsó. The literal translation of the title is "And the People Still Ask", a quote from a poem by Sándor Petőfi.
Inquiring Nuns is a 1968 Kartemquin Films production directed by Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner. The documentary film features Sisters Marie Arne and Mary Campion, two young Catholic nuns who visit a variety of Chicago locales to ask people the question, "Are you happy?" They meet a variety of individuals ranging from hippie musicians to intellectuals, whose responses are everything from the mundane to the spiritual. The film was directly influenced by Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un été, which Quinn and Temaner had watched at Doc Films while they were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. The film was shot on Kartemquin's “Camera #1”, a custom-modified crystal sync Auricon with a used manual zoom lens Quinn purchased from Albert Maysles, and to which he added a World War II gunner handle bought from a pawn shop as an extra grip for steadiness.
A Good Man is a 2011 documentary film about Tony Award-winning dance choreographer, Bill T. Jones, and his efforts to create the dance-theatre piece, "Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray", a salute to Abraham Lincoln for Chicago's Ravinia Festival. A Good Man details Jones's personal struggles with race and coming to grips with the legacy of the Lincoln Presidency and the American Civil War. From the initial pre-production to the show's final performance, the documentary follows Jones as he attempts to connect with his dancers and convey the spirit of the civil rights movement that has inspired him as an artist.
Prisoner of Her Past is a 2010 documentary film, produced by Kartemquin Films, that follows the journey of Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich as he travels to Europe to discover why his elderly mother, Sonia Reich, believes people are trying to kill her.
Taylor Chain I & II are a pair of documentary films, produced by Kartemquin FIlms, that first examine a seven-week workers' strike at a Hammond, Indiana, chain manufacturing plant and then follow the collective bargaining process of the same plant one decade later. Originally released by Kartemquin as two separate short documentaries in 1980 and 1984, Taylor Chain I & II were released together to show how the decade-long labor movement was affected by the recession and anti-union legislation of the early 1980s.
Judy Hoffman is an American filmmaker and arts activist based in Chicago. She graduated from Northwestern University with a MFA and currently holds a faculty position at the University of Chicago. Hoffman has played a major role in the development of Kartemquin Films, a documentary filmmaking company founded in Chicago in 1966. Hoffman has worked with extensively with Kwakwaka’wakw, a First Nation in British Columbia, to produce films. Hoffman has brought activism to her films, and continues to show different facets of the city of Chicago.
Almost There is a 2014 independent documentary film, produced by Kartemquin Films. It was directed by Aaron Wickenden and Dan Rybicky.
Peter Kuttner is a Chicago filmmaker, activist, and cameraman. He is known for his early socially-conscious documentary films that touch on topics such as opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, gentrification of Chicago, racism, and social class. He produced many of these with the film collective Kartemquin Films, of which he was an original member. He is best known for his work on the film The End of the Nightstick (1993) with Cindi Moran and Eric Scholl, which documented police brutality in Chicago and torture allegations against commander Jon Burge. Kuttner has worked extensively in activism and community service, and was a founding member of activist group Rising Up Angry. Kuttner has worked with many collaborators including Kartemquin Collective founder Gordon Quinn, and filmmakers Haskell Wexler and Robert Kramer. He is also known for camera work on a number of major motion pictures including Man of Steel and Source Code.
Dan Sallitt is an American filmmaker and film critic. He is known for his microbudget filmmaking and cinephile film criticism.
Talking to Strangers is a 1988 American drama film directed by Rob Tregenza. It marked Tregenza's debut as a feature-length film director, screenwriter and cinematographer. It is composed of nine scenes, each one filmed only once and presented as an uninterrupted ten-minute take. Except for the first and last scenes, the remaining seven were arranged in a random order chosen by Tregenza's computer.
