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DVD, Blu-ray, and Television Launches of Award-Winning Chicago Documentary The Interrupters

Posted Thursday, January 26th, 2012 - Comments Off on DVD, Blu-ray, and Television Launches of Award-Winning Chicago Documentary The Interrupters
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Star Ameena Matthews to appear on The Colbert Report

Kartemquin Films has produced independent documentary films in Chicago since 1966. We’re pleased to announce the February 14th DVD, Blu-ray and US television premieres of our film The Interrupters, the Chicago Film Critics Association’s “Best Documentary of 2011.”

PBS will release the DVD and Blu-ray editions of The Interrupters on Feb. 14. That same evening, PBS FRONLTINE will air the television premiere of The Interrupters at 9p.m. EST / 8p.m. CST.

Chicago’s WTTW will host a roundtable discussion immediately following the Feb. 14 broadcast, featuring violence interrupters Ameena Mathews, Cobe Williams Eddie Bocanegra and Director for CeaseFire Illinois Tio Hardiman.

Ameena Matthews, one of the stars of the film – awarded “Chicagoan of the Year in Film” by the Chicago Tribune and ranked as one of TIME’s “Top 10 film performances of the year” – will be featured on The Colbert Report Wednesday, February 1, at 11:30p.m. EST / 10:30pm CST on Comedy Central.

Colbert’s on-air persona is known to put his guests in the hot seat, but Matthews is no stranger to pressure. “I’m so excited,” she says. “I just hope I won’t need to kick his ass!”

In celebration of Kartemquin’s first-ever Blu-ray release, pre-orders for The Interrupters are available at a 20% discount through the Kartemquin’s store. Randomly selected pre-order purchasers will also receive posters signed by cast members and producers.

The Interrupters was released in 2011 to far-reaching acclaim both within the city and around the world, and cited as one of the best films of the year by Village Voice, IndieWIRE, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, Slate, and The New Yorker.

The Interrupters’ director Steve James will attend the Director’s Guild of America awards this Saturday as a nominee for Best Documentary. Most recently, the film won Best Film and Best Director at the Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking. When it screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in August, The Interrupters became the biggest box office success in the venue’s 40-year history.

In 2008, Chicago received national coverage for its increasing levels of violence. The Interrupters follows three “violence interrupters,” who attempt to stop disease of violence at its core. Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra work with troubled Chicagoans whose stories capture the traumas of violence, poverty, families, and race relations in a city fraught with tension. The Chicago Tribune called the film “Chicago to the bone yet universal in its implications.”

The Music Box Theatre presents a special screening of The Interrupters on Sunday, February 19, along with Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County USA, which depicts a lengthy coal miners’ strike in rural Kentucky. The Interrupters producer-director Steve James will appear for a post-film discussion with author Robert Elder, for the third installment of “The Film That Changed My Life” series. 

Kartemquin Films is a home for independent media makers who seek to create social change through film. This Chicago-based documentary powerhouse has won every major critical and journalistic prize, including an Emmy, a Peabody and an Oscar nomination. With seven new films in progress, Kartemquin is building on more than 45 years of history as Chicago’s documentary powerhouse. www.kartemquin.com

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon