Jim Klein
Directing
Biography
Jim Klein has been an active member of the independent film movement since the early 1970s. He is a founder of the pioneering film distribution co-operative New Day Films and active in the filmmaker organizations that shaped the field. With partner, Julia Reichert, he created such innovative documentaries as Growing Up Female, the first documentary about women from a feminist perspective, which was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress; Academy Award nominee Union Maids, one of the first oral history films; and Academy Award nominee Seeing Red, a challenging film about American communists. His films Letter to the Next Generation and Taken for a Ride both had national broadcasts on PBS’s flagship POV series.
Known For
Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.
POV
An abandoned teen jumps a freight train in Philadelphia intent on reaching his uncle in Indiana, whom he believes will help him with financial difficulties including a pregnant girlfriend. In Ohio, he meets another homeless teen, who escorts him to his uncle. Finding his uncle equally broke, the duo head on to Oklahoma City to try to find the first teen's long-gone ex-con father. A confrontation between father and son send the duo on into exploits in the west including getting beaten up, busting into an Indian reservation church, and hitch-hiking with a beautiful nurse.
The Dream Catcher
This documentary provides a window into the extraordinary life of activist and Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who has worked to regain ownership of her country and its fate after years of colonialism. While gentle and thoughtful, Maathai carries a powerful message: the First World holds much of the responsibility for the environmental, economic and social struggles of the developing world.
Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
Following the lives of six girls and women between the ages of four and thirty-five, this documentary examines how American society shapes female identity through family, education, media, and expectations about marriage.
Growing Up Female
A unique documentary that looks at the political activities of the American Communist Party in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists
Three women labor activists in America tell their stories of organizing in the 1930s.
Union Maids
The clients of a Dayton, Ohio drug withdrawal clinic, many of whom are workers in the area factories, are the subject of this socially conscious documentary
Methadone: An American Way of Dealing
How the American auto industry engineered the demise of city public-transit systems.
Taken for a Ride
Are college students today apathetic and self-centered? Twenty years after National Guardsmen opened fire on student antiwar demonstrators, Jim Klein, a 60's radical-turned-filmmaker (Union Maids, Seeing Red) visits the campus of Kent State to probe behind the stereotypes. Together with young patrons of the local tanning salon, activists-turned-professors, and an ROTC captain, Klein ponders the social forces that are changing campuses and the country in the 90's.