Hoop Dreams

The trouble with documentaries is always that the maker risks ending up telling you their own narrative. A lot of the time someone like Michael Moore might as well write their own script and use actors rather than use documentary footage. After all, his documentaries come across more like polemics than windows on the world. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making a documentary like this, but in doing so the writer risks a crass editorialisation that can serve to undercut their argument. Michael Moore treads this line carefully, but despite the power of his films he is often guilty of crossing a line that makes him look like a raving nutter.

Hoop Dreams is nearly 3 hours of footage following two young boys - Arthur Agee and William Gates - from the Chicago ghettos over 4 years of their lives. The boys are each spotted as potential future basketball stars and packed off to a plush out-of-town high school with scholarships and dreams of glory. The film was put together from hundreds of hours of footage, showing how the boys react to the stresses put upon them out their new middle class school and how their youthful dreams of glory are slowly squeezed by the ruthlessly results-driven world of US high school sport.

By presenting footage with minimal voice-over effects, 'Hoop Dreams' is the the opposite of a heavily editorialised polemic. Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions about the US sports scholarship system. Is it a way of giving hope to millions of deprived children? Or is it a cynical way of industrialising childhood dreams? It's a system in which the underlying class and racial prejudices of US society manifest in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle, a system in which the dreams of youth are exploited while they show promise and dashed just as quickly when that promise fades. But a system none-the-less that helps a lucky few achieve fame, riches and success.

Hoop dreams is an excellent documentary. Anyone interested in the influence of sports on High School life in the USA could do a lot worse that reading Friday Night Lights - a book that charts the progress of a high school American football team over the course of a single school year. Though ostensibly a book about American football, it's really about American society, class, money, race, The American Dream and the prejudices and pains that come with an expectation to succeed.