The acclaimed feature landed on a dozen "Top Ten Films of the Year" lists for 2003. James' next documentary, "Stevie," won major festival awards at Sundance, Amsterdam, Yamagata and Philadelphia, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. The film earned James the Directors Guild of America Award and the MTV Movie Award's "Best New Filmmaker." Recently, "Hoop Dreams" was selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, signifying the film's enduring importance to American film history. "Hoop Dreams" won every major critics award as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Steve James is the award-winning director, producer, and co-editor of "Hoop Dreams," which began his longtime association with Kartemquin Films in Chicago. I hope this film can have something to say, not just about race and sports, but race and American society at this particularly crucial moment in our country's history. Ultimately, I wanted to revisit what happened 16 years ago so I can learn what the lasting legacy of it is for the city's black and white communities, and for Allen Iverson himself. ESPN really responded to the idea that I will make this something of a "first person" exploration, where I can also draw upon my own experiences of sports and race relations in the course of the film. My mother (who still lives in the house I grew up in) became the school nurse the first year the city integrated its all black high school. My late father was a star athlete and inductee into the Hampton Sports Hall of Fame. Trial," dividing the city largely along racial lines and bringing the issue of race into the public arena for perhaps the first time in the city's history.Īs a native of Hampton who grew up and played high school basketball there this story resonates for me in very personal ways.
That incident and the subsequent trial became Hampton's "O.J. Sixteen years ago, Allen Iverson was a junior at Bethel High School when he became involved in a racial bowling-alley brawl. That's why they responded so strongly to my idea: To go back to my hometown of Hampton and revisit a pivotal moment not just in that city's sports history, but in it's social and racial history as well. I love the idea that ESPN wanted to work with independent filmmakers with the goal being to make films, not just smart journalism, about subjects that the filmmakers care passionately about. This was not to be a typical sports series that attempted to cover all the bases of what has happened in the world of sports in the last thirty years. When I first heard that ESPN was launching this ambitious effort, I couldn't believe it.
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