THE INTERRUPTERS a Film by Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz
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A Cinema Guild Release KARTEMQUIN FILMS in association with RISE FILMS present THE INTERRUPTERS A film by Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz Photographed and Directed by Steve James Produced by Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James (Note to press: When referencing The Interrupters, please credit both Steve and Alex; they were creative partners in the making of the film. Thanks.) Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival, 2011 Special Jury Award, Full Frame Film Festival, 2011 Audience Award for Best Documentary, Philadelphia Cinefest, 2011 Best Documentary Award, Miami International Film Festival, 2011 Best Documentary Award, Minneapolis Film Festival, 2011 True Life Fund Winner, True/False Film Festival, 2011 Official Selection, South by Southwest Film Festival, 2011 125 minutes / 1.78:1 / Dolby Digital 2.0 / In English / Not Rated / Stills available at: www.cinemaguild.com/downloads Publicity Contact Susan Norget Susan Norget Film Promotion 198 Sixth Ave., Ste. 1 New York, NY 10013 Tel: 212.431.0090 Fax: 212.680.3181 [email protected] SYNOPSIS THE INTERRUPTERS tells the moving and surprising story of three dedicated individuals who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they, themselves once employed. These “violence interrupters” (their job title) – who have credibility on the street because of their own personal histories – intervene in conflicts before the incidents explode into violence. Their work and their insights are informed by their own journeys, which, as each of them point out, defy easy characterization. Shot over the course of a year out of Kartemquin Films, THE INTERRUPTERS captures a period in Chicago when it became a national symbol for the violence in our cities. During that period, the city was besieged by high-profile incidents, most notably the brutal beating death of Derrion Albert, a Chicago High School student whose death was caught on videotape. The “violence interrupters” work for an innovative organization, CeaseFire, which is the brainchild of epidemiologist Gary Slutkin who for ten years battled the spread of cholera and AIDS in Africa. Slutkin believes that the spread of violence mimics that of infectious diseases, and so the treatment should be similar: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. Their work is fraught with moral quandaries. They have to step between adversaries, often people they know. They need to acknowledge people’s grievances while simultaneously pulling them back from acting on them. And on occasion, they find themselves using the very threat of violence to defuse an altercation. As they venture into their communities, they confront the importance of family, the noxious nature of poverty, and the place of race. And they do it with incredible candor and directness. Ameena Matthews, whose father is Jeff Fort, one of the city’s most notorious gang leaders, was herself once a drug ring enforcer. But having children and finding solace in her Muslim faith pulled her off the streets and grounded her. In the wake of Derrion Albert’s death, Ameena becomes a close confidante to his mother, and helps her through her grieving. Ameena, who is known among her colleagues for her fearlessness, intervenes in an argument over $5, a gang altercation and a group of young men thinking of retaliating for a friend’s murder. During one interruption, Ameena befriends a feisty, troubled teenaged girl who reminds her of her own self at that age. The film follows that friendship over the course of many months, as Ameena tries to nudge the troubled girl in the right direction. Cobe Williams, scarred by his father’s murder when he was 12-years-old, was in and out of prison, until he had had enough. Like Ameena, his family – particularly a young son – helped him find his footing. Cobe disarms others with his humor and his general good nature. His most challenging moment comes when he has to confront a man so bent on revenge that Cobe has to pat him down to make sure he’s put away his gun. Like Ameena, he gets deeply involved in the lives of those he encounters, including a teenaged boy just out of prison and a young man from his old neighborhood who’s squatting in a foreclosed home. Eddie Bocanegra is haunted by a murder he committed when he was seventeen. It’s become the centripetal force in his life. His CeaseFire work is a part of his repentance for 2 what he did. Eddie is most deeply disturbed by the aftereffects of the violence on children, and so he spends much of his time working with younger kids in an effort to both keep them off the streets and to get support to those who need it – including a 16-year-old girl whose brother died in her arms. Soulful and empathic, Eddie, who learned to paint in prison, teaches art to children, trying warn them of the debilitating trauma experienced by those touched by the violence. THE INTERRUPTERS follows Ameena, Cobe and Eddie as they go about their work, and while doing so reveals their own inspired journeys of hope and redemption. From acclaimed director Steve James and bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, this film is an unusually intimate journey into the stubborn persistence of violence in our cities. The film attempts to make sense of what CeaseFire’s Tio Hardiman calls, simply, “the madness”. 3 THE INTERRUPTERS DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT – STEVE JAMES For me, making THE INTERRUPTERS, feels like a homecoming. Since completing Hoop Dreams in 1994, I’ve made documentaries that have taken me to near and far-flung places - Southern Illinois, Texas, Fiji, Nigeria, and Virginia, among others - but I guess you could say my heart and soul belongs to Chicago. This film gave me a chance to return to some of the same streets and neighborhoods we traversed in Hoop Dreams. And while that film followed the fortunes of two families hoping to use basketball as a ticket out of poverty, the harsh realities of urban violence and despair suffused their lives then and now. In recent years, two main subjects from the film, Arthur’s dad Bo and William’s brother Curtis, were murdered. In both cases, these tragedies had a profound impact on the families. With the Agee’s, it led to Arthur’s mom moving away from Chicago and back to Alabama where she was born, while Arthur for a while drove his father’s car and wore some of his clothes in a desperate attempt to keep his memory alive. With William, his older brother’s death sent him spiraling down, and eventually to his calling as a minister. Bo and Curtis were on my mind when I first read Alex’s New York Times Magazine cover story on CeaseFire (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html). Alex and I have been friends for about ten years. We met when an acquaintance decided we should know each other. I already knew Alex’s seminal book, There Are No Children Here. In it, he’d done something remarkable: spend extensive time with a family living in one of Chicago’s notorious housing projects. What emerged was a book that illuminated honestly and heartbreakingly the lives of two brothers exiled to the margins of our society like so many in these neighborhoods. Alex’s NYT’s article on CeaseFire struck a chord with me in the way it vividly told the story of an organization trying to find a new way to impact what has seemed an intractable problem in these communities for decades, one that no longer made headlines, perhaps leaving people numb or resigned to it. So I called Alex up and said, we may have found the film project to do together. He agreed so we began meeting with various CeaseFire staff and interrupters Alex had interviewed to see if a film was possible – and determine if it were plausible for us to gain real access to the work the interrupters do in the streets. Encouraged by their response and our fundraising success, filming began in earnest in the Spring of 2009. We shot over 300 hours during the next 14 months. The core team during the production phase was Alex, co-producer and sound recordist Zak Piper, and myself. We wanted to keep the crew small enough to encourage an essential intimacy and authenticity. For this reason, I also handled the camera to eliminate the need for one other crewmember. Alex had never been involved in a film like this before, but he proved to be a quick learner. Because he knew the landscape of the inner city so intimately from his other work, it felt like we were on the same wavelength from the start. And not surprisingly, he was a terrific interviewer. The other core team member was talented editor Aaron Wickenden, who began cutting scenes in January of 2010, while our filming was in full swing. Aaron and I eventually tag- team edited once filming was largely complete. (Although we were a constant source of 4 humor at Kartemquin Films because we never met a scene we didn’t want to film, even deep into the editing). A cynic might ask just how much editing was done given a running time of 2:24! Whether the film deserves and rewards its length is up to every viewer to decide. But for us as filmmakers, we felt it our duty to give the viewer the kind of complex, surprising, sometimes disturbing, sometimes incredibly moving experience in the theater that we were privy to over those 14 months. We want the film to be an immersive experience for the audience, one that plunges them into communities plagued by violence, while also allowing them to step back and understand it.