Born of an assignment for a half-hour PBS special, Hoop Dreams, which premiered at Sundance in 1994, put filmmaker Steve James on the map, winning the festival’s Audience Award for Best Documentary. Shot over the course of five years, the movie focuses on the lofty NBA aspirations of two Black teenagers from disadvantaged communities, William Gates and Arthur Agee, who are recruited to play basketball at a private, predominantly white prep school. Released on the heels of MTV’s groundbreaking The Real World (but, it must be noted, the film was started before that project), Hoop Dreams landed as a lived-in, deeply moving piece of cinematic portraiture, exploring the complexities of race, socioeconomic opportunity, and education in American society. Despite its length (2 hours and 50 minutes, whittled down from over 250 hours of footage), the movie was both a critical smash and an arthouse hit. Its Sundance-minted $11.8 million theatrical gross indisputably altered both the entertainment industry’s perception about the commercial viability of documentaries, as well as the public’s relationship to nonfiction films, paving the way for the future box office success of everything from Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 to March Of The Penguins and Walt Disney Studios’ Disneynature label. [Brent Simon]