Film. Wine. Truth. Vino Vérité presented by Bread Garden Market and Little Village is a series featuring talented new voices and established masters of vérité filmmaking in person to present their thought-provoking, chance-taking, and visually-arresting films.

The series title, “Vino Vérité” is a playful combination of the latin phrase “in vino veritas”—in wine there is truth—and the filmmaking term “cinema vérité,” a naturalistic approach to storytelling which seeks to observe truth through intimate, candid realism.

ABOUT HOOP DREAMS

Few movies have impacted both popular culture and the film industry on the same level as Steve James’ Hoop Dreams. The film was originally planned as a 30-minute PBS project, but filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert saw a deeper story. The result is an epic tale of hope and heartbreak that sprawls over five years in the lives of two ordinary teens with extraordinary ambitions. Those two young men, Arthur Agee and William Gates, dare to dream of NBA stardom from the courts of inner-city Chicago.

Basketball is the medium in Hoop Dreams, but the American Dream is the message, and Hoop Dreams resonated with audiences across the country. The film stayed in theaters for nearly a year, becoming the highest grossing documentary film of all time, and changed public and industry perception about documentaries as cinematic viewing. Hoop Dreams was a cultural phenomenon, Snoop Dogg dropped a track titled “Hoop Dreams,” and the film was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Even now, thirty years later, James’ work still resonates as one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER

Steve James is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose previous work includes Academy Award nominated films Hoop Dreams and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Other award-winning work includes Stevie, The Interrupters, At the Death House Door, and Life Itself. His work has won numerous Emmy’s, two Independent Spirit Awards, two Peabody Awards, a Dupont Columbia Journalism Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Two recent docuseries, America to Me and City So Real, were among the most acclaimed TV shows of the years in which they aired. In 2023, ESPN aired his award-winning docuseries, The Luckiest Guy in the World, which IndieWire named one of the best documentaries of the year. His most recent film, A Compassionate Spy, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures in 2023.

Sundance Film Festival (1994) — World Premiere

Sundance Film Festival (1994) — Audience Award

Library of Congress (2005) — United States National Film Registry Designation