Film Club: HOOP DREAMS
About this Live Online Event
It’s impossible to imagine the history of American documentary cinema without Hoop Dreams. Directed by Steve James alongside producers Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert, this landmark film began its public journey at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Documentary. The film would go on to become one of the most artistically and commercially successful documentaries of the 1990s, garnering an Oscar nomination and $11 million at the box office. In an era when narrative documentaries rarely screened at mainstream multiplexes, Hoop Dreams introduced a whole generation to the emotional power of nonfiction storytelling.
The Film Club event series will devote its November session to Hoop Dreams, the three-hour epic tale of teenage basketball players William Gates and Arthur Agee. A monthly, community-driven deep dive into the soul of the Sundance Film Festival, Film Club highlights one film each month from the recently-published Sundance Film Festival 101 Watchlist.
In this free, online event, Film Club host Kiva Reardon will unpack Hoop Dreams as a landmark observational documentary. Reardon will discuss the formal qualities that make the film so compelling to cinephiles and lay viewers alike. She will also explore the film’s complicated legacy as a film about race in America, its impact on the documentary film industry, and its influence on future filmmakers such as Bing Liu (Minding the Gap) and RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening).
Reardon’s presentation will include clips, slides, and a Q&A during which attendees can ask questions about this basketball classic. This event will conclude with participants entering breakout rooms to discuss the film in small groups.
Join our next monthly Film Club series with Kiva Reardon.
Claim your free spot now.
Visit JustWatch to learn where you can stream or rent the film in your region.
If you would benefit from an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please complete this form, contact us at (435) 776-7790, or email us at accessibility@sundance.org to discuss your specific requests. Every effort will be made to accommodate advance requests; however, requests made within 5 days of the event may not be guaranteed.
A recording of this session will be posted to Film Club within two business days of the live event.Everyone who registers for this session will receive an email with a link to view the recording when it is posted!
Live Online EventHost
Kiva Reardon
Kiva Reardon is a producer, writer, and programmer working across fiction and non-fiction. Previously, she held the positions of: Vice President of Film at Barry Jenkins’s production company PASTEL; Associate Director of Film Programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; and Lead Programmer of Contemporary World Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
She founded cléo journal, a publication dedicated to film and feminism, which ran from 2013 to 2019. Under Kiva’s leadership, cléo became an internationally-respected outlet that helped launch a new generation of film writers. IndieWire called cléo an "essential source for smart, fresh, and feminist perspectives on film and media." Its print compendium was published in 2020.
Her writing has appeared in Filmmaker, Sight & Sound, MUBI Notebook, Cineaste, and many others. She writes a newsletter on movies and motherhood, Care Takes. She has acted as an advisor at screenwriting labs and served on festival juries at Locarno, Jeonju, Palm Springs, Aspen, and more. She has spoken at film and art institutions around the world. She is on the founding Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.