Kartemquin Films will become the first documentary company to receive the Newberry Library’s 25-year-old Altgeld Freedom of Speech Award at a ceremony July 31.
“Kartemquin has held a mirror up to American society for more than four decades by using video to uncover and disseminate reports of difficult, ignored, and unpopular subjects,” says a Newberry library statement about the award.
“Like anybody who makes serious work, we’ve had issues with censorship,” says Kartemquin cofounder and executive director Gordon Quinn, citing the 1976 film “The Chicago Maternity Center Story.”
It was pulled from the New York PBS series “Independent Lens” (a different show than the current national PBS series) over its aggressive political stance.
“We were attacking the industrialization of medicine, and in particular women’s healthcare and childbirth,” Quinn says. “The film was analytical, and some would say polemical.”
Through a grant from the National Film Preservation Fund, Kartemquin is restoring “The Chicago Maternity Center Story,” with plans to rerelease it by the end of this year.
Kartemquin has remained issue-oriented but its approach has evolved from the advocacy orientation of their “middle period,” returning to the more v?rit? approach of their earliest films with their biggest hit, 1994’s doc about inner city basketball hopefuls and their families, “Hoop Dreams.”
“A lot of people saw that film that would never tune in and watch a film about an inner city family on welfare,” Quinn says. “It’s about sports, it’s family driven ?- it drew in a wide audience and changed people’s minds about people that tend to be stereotyped.”
Kartemquin has advocated for media democracy for decades
Quinn founded Kartemquin in 1966 with Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter. Last year Quinn stepped over from executive director to artistic director as part of a strategic plan to assure the company’s long-term sustainability, including an effort to diversity its funding sources, which are dominated by foundation grants.
