e: katie@katiescarlettbrandt.com

If you let documentary filmmaker Gordon Quinn, AB’65, into your life, he’ll likely be around for years. He’ll want to burrow in, get to know what you see. “You get a very different story if you only spend a week or two,” he says. “We spend years. We really see people come to terms.”

Quinn is the man behind the last four letters of Kartemquin, the Chicago-based film company he founded in the Sixties with two fellow alumni: Stan Karter, X’66, and Jerry Temaner, AB’57, left during the company’s infant years. Their first film, Home for Life (1966), offered an 80-minute glimpse of a man and woman’s initial month in a home for the elderly, as they realized their dwindling abilities. Its unflinching, personal portrayal set the tone for the company’s future films.

Kartemquin’s offices have since moved from Hyde Park to an old building in the North Side’s Roscoe Village neighborhood, but it still reflects a strong U of C influence. Alumni make up at least a third, Quinn estimates, of Kartemquin’s roughly 20 staff members, interns, or filmmakers. From its Chicago home, he says, Kartemquin “brings Midwest stories and values to the rest of the country.”

...to read more, click here