The Chicagoan’s unwavering journey to his orchestral debut at the age of 79 is the subject of the film  “For the Left Hand” airing Friday, November 5 at 9:00 pm and Sunday, November 7 at 4:00 pm on WTTW. (Courtesy Kartemquin Films)

Norman Malone never abandoned his dream of becoming a concert pianist – despite a violent attack by his father that left his right side paralyzed at the age of 10. A new documentary chronicles the Chicagoan’s path from child prodigy to high school music teacher to his orchestral debut at age 79.

Filmmaker Steve James appears on “Chicago Tonight” on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (WTTW News)

For more than a year, documentary filmmaker Steve James and his collaborators fanned out across Chicago at a pivotal moment. James tells us about the resulting five-part series that premieres this week on NatGeo and Hulu.

Documentary filmmaker Gordon Quinn was diagnosed with COVID-19 and spent a month in the hospital, where he was placed on a ventilator multiple times. He shares his story.

It’s one of the most outrageous cases of municipal fraud in modern times. We discuss “All the Queen’s Horses” with the documentary’s director, Kelly Richmond Pope.

(Pranav Bhatt / Flickr)
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A new documentary from Chicago’s Kartemquin Films revisits an extreme weather event that killed more than 700 people – most of them poor and black. We discuss “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code” with producer Fenell Doremus.

An image from the series “America to Me.” (Photo: Kartemquin Films)

A conversation with “Hoop Dreams” director Steve James, who tackles an ambitious series about racial disparity in a Chicago-area high school.

A still image from “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.”

Oscar nominations came out earlier this week, and the “Frontline” documentary “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” garnered a nod in the best documentary feature category. It was made by the Chicago team at Kartemquin Films. 

A city treasurer with a love of horses managed to embezzle nearly $54 million from a small town of just 16,000 people. The new documentary “All The Queen’s Horses” looks at the case of Rita Crundwell.

The life and influence of movie critic Roger Ebert are celebrated in a documentary by the makers of Hoop Dreams. We get a preview.

Fifty years ago today, 200,000 Chicagoans boycotted segregationist policies by Chicago Public Schools. Watch a video clip from a new documentary that chronicles the protest and read an article.