Hoop Dreams

Hoop Dreams follows Arthur Agee and William Gates, two young men from Chicago's inner city who dream of making it to the NBA. Over five years, filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert capture their journeys through elite high school basketball programs, revealing the pressures of family hardship, racial inequality, and the exploitative nature of sports recruitment. The film transcends sports to become a profound portrait of the American Dream and the obstacles that complicate it.

• Originally planned as a 30-minute short documentary film.
• Filming spanned five years, from 1987 to 1992.
• Roger Ebert called it the best film of the 1990s.
• The film was controversially snubbed at the 1995 Oscars.
• Over 250 hours of footage was edited down to three.

• Everything I been through, basketball is all I got.
• Everybody who's ever made it, they had someone to help them.
• I don't want my kids growing up and saying their daddy was a failure.
• You got to want it more than anything else in the world.
• I always wanted to go to the NBA. That's my dream.