Stevie

Still a student in Southern Illinois, director Steve James volunteers as 11-year-old Stevie Fielding’s “Advocate Big Brother”. He becomes a part of the troubled child’s life but, after graduation, he leaves both Illinois and Stevie behind and pursues his filmmaking career. Ten years later, James decides to return to make a film about Stevie. Who is Stevie and who are the forces that once shaped, and still have a firm grip on, his personality and life?
The young man’s life, he finds out, is a disaster waiting to happen and part way through the filming, Stevie is arrested and charged with a serious crime. What was to be a modest profile turns into a four and half-year chronicle of Stevie, his family, the criminal justice and the filmmaker – who finds himself pulled further and further into the drama unfolding in front of the camera. The film is marked by his feelings of personal guilt about Stevie. Guilt not over being there for him and, ultimately, for making the movie about him.
With Stevie, his second feature-length documentary (following the widely acclaimed Hoop Dreams (1994)), award-winning filmmaker Steve James tells a story intimate in scale but with an extended thematic scoop. Stevie is an honest documentary depicting social problems in contemporary society by telling a real-life story of a victim who tragically becomes a perpetrator.
CARIN LARSSON