Stevie

In his college days in the early 1980s, director Steve James was a Big Brother for Stevie Fielding, a traumatized, hyperactive kid from a dysfunctional family. In 1995, after the success of Hoop Dreams, James decides to return to Illinois and pay a visit to Stevie. He does so because he is still worried about the boy, but he is also entertaining the idea of making a film about Stevie's life - a fact that he admits quite frankly. Stevie turns out to be living in a trailer with his step-grandmother, a stone's throw away from his mother with whom he rarely speaks anymore. After a failed marriage, he now has a mentally disabled girlfriend and is almost permanently unemployed. Two years into filming, Stevie is charged with a horrifying crime whose legal outcome takes nearly three years to resolve. James's film is an attempt to understand Stevie and his complex past, a childhood fraught with violence and abuse. In the process, this same attempt puts the filmmaker face to face with his own actions. The result is a discerning, sometimes shocking and often touching portrait of the world of the American subclass derisively known as "white trailer trash" - including their humor, their resilience, and their unremitting aspiration to lead normal lives.