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A Good Man

Producer: Joanna Rudnick

Director: Gordon Quinn, Bob Hercules

Cinematography: Keith Walker

Status: Production

A Good Man follows the Tony Award winning choreographer Bill T. Jones in his attempt to tell the story of Abraham Lincoln through dance inspired by a commission from the Ravinia Festival. The resulting work, "A Good Man", will be performed in September of 2009 at the Festival as part of its "Mystic Chords of Memory" program in honor of Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial. The New York Times claims that Jones' "portrayal of Lincoln is likely to scandalize as many people as it delights."

Column

No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson

Director/Producer: Steve James

Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn

Producer: Adam Singer

Status: Production

A Kartemquin Films production for ESPN… On February 13, 1993, 17-year-old Bethel High School basketball star Allen Iverson entered a Hampton, Virginia bowling alley with several classmates. It was supposed to be an ordinary evening, but it became a night that defined Iverson's young life a quarrel soon erupted into a brawl pitting Iverson's young, black friends against a group of older white men. The fallout from the fight and the handling of the subsequent trial landed the nation's best high school athlete in jail and sharply divided the city along racial lines. Oscar nominee Steve James (Hoop Dreams) returns to his hometown of Hampton, where he once played basketball, to take a personal look at this still disputed incident and examine its impact on Iverson and the shared community.
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Prisoner of Her Past

Director: Gordon Quinn

Producers: Joanna Rudnick, Howard Reich

Producer: Jerry Blumenthal

Status: Production

Kartemquin Films and award-winning journalist Howard Reich are in production on a documentary feature based on "Prisoner of Her Past," a searing article written by Reich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a special section of the newspaper on Nov. 30, 2003. The article recounts Howard's journey to Dubno, in Ukraine, where he reconstructs the harsh childhood of his mother, Sonia, who began running and hiding from the Nazis when she was 10 years old during the Second World War and who now suffers from late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder. Visit official site

Column

Typeface

Director/Producer: Justine Nagan

Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn, Maria Finitzo

Status: Production

In rural Wisconsin, a lone employee waits in a cavernous old museum for visitors to come. A few individuals straggle in every few days and then, come Friday, the museum fills with life. Machines hum, presses print, artists buzz about. One weekend each month, the quiet of Two Rivers is interrupted as carloads of artisans drive in from across the Midwest. The place comes alive as printmaking workshops led by, and filled with, some of the nation’s top design talent descend on the sleepy enclave.

In a time when people can carry computers in their pockets and watch TV while walking down the street, Typeface dares to explore the twilight of an analog craft that is freshly inspiring artists in a digital age. The Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, WI personifies cultural preservation, rural re-birth and the lineage of American graphic design. At Hamilton, international artisans meet retired craftsmen and together navigate the convergence of modern design and traditional technique. But the Museum’s days are numbered. What is the responsibility of artists and historians to preserve a dying craft? How can rural towns survive in a shifting industrial marketplace where big-box retailers are king?

Visit the official site.

In Development

The Fine Print

Director/Producer: Maria Finitzo

Executive Producer/Producer: Gordon Quinn

Executive Producer: Justine Nagan

The Fine Print, a feature-length documentary produced by Kartemquin Films, in partnership with Director Maria Finitzo, will explore and decode the financial woes now affecting every sector of this country by looking at the immensely complicated situation from the bottom up.  As we do in all of our films, our understanding starts with the story of the people most deeply affected- in this case with the financial crisis: families struggling to survive and keep their homes. We will explain our nation’s financial downfall by telling these individual stories.  We will look at how they were sold their mortgage, by whom and we will trace this mortgage all the way through the maze of securitized instruments to see where it has ended up. Examining how we got here, what happened and why, The Fine Print will ask basic questions: What do banks do? How have they been operating and how should they have been operating? What were the pressures to make so many bad loans?  What does securitization mean…liquidity and credit?  How did changes in regulations foster the crisis we now face?  Finally we will unpack the complicated economics of derivatives, the why and wherefore of risky subprime loans, the thinking both good and bad behind securitization…in short the entire financial disaster that has befallen us.

But The Fine Print is not a film about the world of finance. Our characters will not be CEOs, hedge fund managers, or investment bankers. Our stories will be found in Marquette Park, a community that has suffered great losses, and our characters will be the people on the front lines of foreclosure: homeowners caught in the nightmare of fine print, community activists struggling to maintain the integrity of their neighborhood, a grade school principal trying to save her school, legal aid lawyers helping their clients navigate the confusing world of foreclosure, and sheriff’s deputies forced to carry out evictions.  Through their stories we will learn how bad mortgages were only the beginning and we will see how every aspect of our economy was dangerously interrelated to risky schemes very few people truly understood.

(In)Visible Seasons

Producer/Director: Maria Finitzo

Producer: Kelly Belanger

Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn

Thirty- five years ago, a life-changing piece of legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, including athletics, was enacted into law. By mandating equal opportunity, Title IX gave legislative muscle to those who were campaigning for more girls’ teams, better sports facilities for girls and women, and higher pay for their coaches. It set in motion far-reaching changes that would not only revolutionize America’s playing fields, but its political, social and cultural landscape as well.

Kartemquin Films, in partnership with Professor Kelly Belanger and the Center for the Study of Rhetoric in Society at Virginia Tech University, is currently developing (In)Visible Seasons, a feature-length documentary that will look at how and why change takes place in a democracy–by not only exploring how Title IX has altered the face of sports, but also by understanding the meaning of sports in the American experience.

(In)Visible Seasons will raise questions of inclusion and exclusion, fairness and tradition, principle and compromise… In the film we will come to understand the power of mentors and role models to inspire the acts of courage, sacrifice, and principle upon which our democracy depends. To be sure, this is a film about sports. But it is also a film about how a democracy achieves equality. In our country, who gets to play and who doesn’t is the yardstick by which we measure how close we are to achieving the goals of a democracy -a level playing field, be it at home, at work or at play.

The Mind's Eye

Director/Producer: David E. Simpson

Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn

The Mind's Eye is a feature-length documentary that takes us intimately inside the world of blindness through first-person encounters with an ensemble of articulate and expressive main characters. They include Richard Donald Smith, a blind flautist and music scholar who teaches at the United Nations School and travels independently to remote corners of Africa; Esref Armagan a congenitally blind visual artist from Turkey, whose uncanny grasp of perspective confounds scientists and art historians; Judy Druck, a 91-year old New Yorker who lectures her great-grandson’s preschool about "overcoming" disability, yet privately laments that she is "sick and bored!" of living without sight; and Christine Faltz, the blind mother of two blind children, whose suburban household presents a microcosm of blindness culture. Through these and other characters, we will probe questions about the sensory, cognitive and cultural aspects of blindness.

Positive Exposure

Director/Producer: Joanna Rudnick

Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn

From In the Family Director Joanna Rudnick, Positive Exposure will follow former fashion photographer Rick Guidotti as he skillfully employs his lens to redefine beauty. Guidotti photographs children who are often relegated to the shadows because of elongated or oversized limbs, cleft palates, facial markings, lack of pigmentation, and other differences that make some turn their heads.  His images are not the grotesque medical studies of the past; they are celebrations of life. Kartemquin Films is partnering with The Genetic Alliance and Rick Guidotti to tell the story of how one man’s lens can change the way we see and experience beauty.