Movies: Gordon Quinn

On October 22, 1963, more than 250,000 students boycotted the Chicago Public Schools to protest racial segregation. Many marched through the city calling for the resignation of School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who placed trailers, dubbed ‘Willi...

In this program, director Bing Liu, executive producer Gordon Quinn, and producer Diane Quon discuss the conception of Minding the Gap and its evolution. The program features separated interviews that were conducted in 2020....

For two years, filmmaker Maria Finitzo followed five strong young women between the ages of 13 and 17. Unlike the myriad reports, books and "specials" that focus on young women as passive and powerless, 5 Girls explores the ways these girls discover ...

Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the ...

Told through the lens of Janaé and Bella, two fierce abolitionist leaders, Unapologetic is a deep look into the Movement for Black Lives, from the police murder of Rekia Boyd to the election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot....

A coming-of-(old)-age story about Peter Anton, an elderly "outsider" artist living in isolated and crippling conditions whose world changes when two filmmakers discover his work and storied past. Shot over eight years, ALMOST THERE documents Anton's ...

Filmmaker Jenny Rohrer explores the growing difference in voting patterns between men and women....

Unbroken Glass is a documentary about filmmaker Dinesh Sabu's journey to understand his parents, who died 20 years ago when he was six years old....

Winnie, the daughter of a steel worker and a teacher, lives in Gage Park, a Chicago neighborhood that is changing from white to black. Her family struggles with racism, inflation and a threatened strike, as Winnie learns what it means to grow up whit...

A Good Man follows acclaimed director/choreographer Bill T. Jones for two tumultuous years, as he tackles the most ambitious work of his career, an original dance-theater piece in honor of Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial....

The last American officials were airlifted out of Vietnam from the embassy roof in Saigon in 1975. Most have never returned. In 1998, World T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports organized a 16-day, 1100 mile bicycle expedition through onc...

In 1981-2, the Kartemquin filmmakers returned to the Taylor Chain plant to show labor and management working together against the odds, trying to save the plant from becoming the latest victim of anti-union legislation and the globalization of cheap,...

While touring the U.S. in a brightly painted school bus, the psychedelic rock collective Anonymous Artists of America stops to hold a performance at an alma mater, the University of Chicago. Inspired by LSD, the group once opened for the Grateful Dea...

Taylor Chain I tells the gritty realities of a seven-week strike at a small Indiana chain factory during 1973-74. Volatile union meetings and tension-filled interactions on the picket line provide an inside view of the tensions and conflicts inherent...

Depicts the experiences of two elderly people in their first month at a home for the aged--a man, isolated from the world he knew, and a woman, wrenched from a family setting. The film focuses on the feelings of the two new residents in their encount...

Leon Golub's massive canvasses depict scenes most of us would prefer not to see - mercenary killings, torture, and death squads. Golub offers not simply a profile of a painter with a political conscience, but an investigation into the power of the ar...

Striking students meet at a "Revolutionary Seminar" at the Art Institute of Chicago in response to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of protesting students at Kent and Jackson State Universities....

A parish youth group in a lower middle-class Chicago neighborhood discusses parental authority, what growing up means and the difficulties of communicating with their parents....

In this cinema-verite documentary, a teenage youth group called Thumbs Down decides "to bring Christ to their neighborhood" by holding an anti-war Mass at their conservative Chicago parish. Neither militants nor hippies, they simply believe that Chri...

At age 10, aspiring pianist Norman Malone is paralyzed on his right side after being attacked by his father. Over the next several decades he masters the left-hand repertoire in secret, before a chance discovery of his talent leads him towards making...