Kartemquin’s festival of new doc projects at ArcLight

Kartemquin Films will cap its 50th anniversary with the Nov. 2-4 Kartemquin Fall Festival, to be held in partnership with ArcLight Cinemas, 1500 N. Clybourn, in Lincoln Park.

The festival, says Gordon Quinn, Kartemquin co-founder and Artistic Director, “emphasizes new projects and rich documentary filmmaking talent in our community and provides a glimpse of the future of documentary filmmaking in Chicago.”

Here are highlights of the three-day festival.

Wednesday, Nov. 2, 6 p.m. Shorts Program of five projects from Kartemquin’s Internship and Diverse Voices in Docs program.

8 p.m. The Chicago premiere of “Unbroken Glass,” the debut feature of director Dinesh Das Sabu, a former Kartemquin intern, in which the filmmaker and his siblings confront the trauma of losing their parents at an early age.

Thursday, Nov. 3, 6 p.m. The 2016 Diverse Voices in Documentary (DVID) Graduation honors the 12 participants and previews clips from each of their projects. Keynote by Lyric Cabral, co-director of (T)ERROR, (winner of the Special Jury Award for Breakout First Feature at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival); reception follows. RSVP here.

8:30 p.m. Chicago premiere of feature-length “City of Trees,” a documentary developed through Kartemquin’s KTQ Labs program, that follows the directors of a stimulus-funded green job-training program designed to put people back to work by caring for Washington, D.C. parks, directed by Lance Kramer and produced by Brandon Kramer.

Friday, Nov. 4, 6 p.m.

8 p.m. Previews of latest works-in-progress, inviting viewers to give feedback directly to the filmmakers:

America to Me,” directed by Steve James dealing with Oak Park River Forest High School’s decades-long racial and educational inequities.

Sergio Rapu’s “Eating Up Easter” uses lessons learned from Easter Island’s past to solve environmental and social challenges from tourism and rapid development.

Maria Finitzo’s “The Dilemma of Desire” explores the complex nature of female sexual desire and the ways in which it is both governed, and fulfilled, by notions of expression and repression.

Sidebar: DVID 2017 applications are now open for the year-long mentorship program for documentary producers of color coordinated by Kartemquin and the Community Film Workshop of Chicago.

Get more Fall Festival information here, and purchase tickets here.