Without celebrities, true crime narratives, villains, or easily “blurb-able” stories, documentaries produced by Kartemquin Films seem “unsellable,” School of Communication professor Patricia Aufderheide writes in her new book chronicling the history of the production company.
Nonetheless, Kartemquin, launched in 1966, has won Oscars, Emmys, and Sundance and Peabody awards for some of its more than 80 documentaries, which explore issues like abortion access, prison reform, mental health, immigration, and disability. The Chicago-based nonprofit “is perhaps the most long-lived, continuously productive, independent social documentary house in the United States,” Aufderheide writes in Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontline of Democracy, released on October 15. “It is also a national leader in shaping the history of independent social-issue documentary.”
Aufderheide, who studies documentary films, previously wrote or cowrote four other books, including Documentary: A Very Short Introduction, which she says is the most-used text for teaching documentary filmmaking in the US. She also founded what is now known as AU’s Center for Media and Social Impact, where she’s a senior research fellow.
Kartemquin documentaries are complex and unsentimental. In 1994, Kartemquin released one of its most highly acclaimed movies, Hoop Dreams, about two Chicago high school basketball players whose efforts to achieve athletic stardom are sidetracked by injury and life circumstances. Hoop Dreams was a breakthrough documentary because it was so lucrative, grossing more than $11 million at the box office, Aufderheide says, and it’s still generating royalty checks.
With Hoop Dreams, Kartemquin showed that documentaries about people “in harshly constrained lives” taking agency could succeed financially, Aufderheide says.
Other notable documentaries produced by Kartemquin include 2014’s The Homestretch, about unhoused high school students, and Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, a 2018 release about climate change told through the lens of the 1995 Chicago heat wave that disproportionately affected poor communities.
From the start, Kartemquin documentaries were “a tool” for democratic discourse, Aufderheide writes: “Kartemquin was an early trendsetter in the genre of socially engaged, character-driven, long-form documentary films that now occupy the top prestige roster of documentary filmmaking in the US.”
Like a Kartemquin film, Aufderheide doesn’t shy away from speaking hard truths.
“Long-form documentaries have more time to evolve a story than a news report,” she says. “But it doesn’t absolve other media from covering those issues.”