Steve James is an American director, producer, and screenwriter, known primarily for his social-issue documentaries. His career achieved international fame with the 1994 film *Hoop Dreams*, an acclaimed work that follows the lives of two young African-American basketball players from Chicago for several years. The film, which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival and a Directors Guild of America Award, is considered a landmark of documentary cinema. His subsequent filmography includes significant works such as *The Interrupters* (2011), the biopic about film critic Roger Ebert *Life Itself* (2014), and *Abacus: Small Enough to Jail* (2016), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. His work frequently explores themes such as social class, race, and justice in the American context, often focusing on the city of Chicago, and is distinguished by its ability to tell complex human stories with depth and empathy.