Michael Kleiman is a documentary filmmaker who has focused on films with social themes. He co-directed The Last Survivor, which was a MIPCOM pick for 2010 and Web , which premiered at the DOC NYC Film Festival where it won the Sundance Now Audience Award.
Kleiman was born in Long Island, NY. [1] He became attracted to cinema as a child, especially after seeing Macaulay Culkin’s performance in Home Alone , then regularly imitated scenes from that movie (especially Keven McAllister’s scene, applying aftershave and screaming into the mirror) as well as scenes from My Cousin Vinny and The Fugitive , in part because it was the only time he was allowed to curse. [2] [3] This interest led him to making his own films in middle school and into high school. [3]
Kleiman received a Fulbright Scholarship and studied film theory, history and criticism at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2006. [2] [4] He discovered documentary making at college, seeing it as a way to combine his love for cinema with a desire to promote social change, [3] working on a series of documentaries highlighting the work of the College Board and the Gates Foundation in public education reform. [4]
He received a masters of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, [5] with the aim of learning how policy is created and evaluated to relate this to filmmaking. [3]
Kleiman’s film career initially began with stints at the documentary department at HBO, working with filmmakers Andrew Bujalski and Albert Maysles as an editor and crew member. [2] [4] In 2009 he worked in the editorial department at Beeswax as a post-production assistant. [6]
Shortly after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, he teamed up with classmate Michael Pertnoy to found Righteous Pictures, dedicated to creating films with a progressive social agenda. [3] Films with this organization include the documentary The Last Survivor in 2010, which he co-directed and co-edited. [6] The Last Survivor is about survivors of genocides such as the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur and the Congo, [3] and was a MIPCOM pick for 2010. [7]
Kleiman’s second documentary feature is called Web, (2013) which he directed, co-edited and co-produced. [6] The idea for “Web” came after reading Robert Wright’s book Nonzero, a speech by Bill Clinton on interdependence and learning about the One Laptop per Child program. [3] Taking four years to make with government and private financing, the film premiered at the DOC NYC Film Festival in 2013. [3] The documentary follows several Peruvian families as they gain computer and Internet access for the first time through the One Laptop per Child program as well as interviews with people such as author Clay Shirky, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Scott Heiferman of Meetup and One Laptop founder Nicholas Negroponte . [1] [8] [9] Kleiman spent ten months living in Peru, dividing his time in the towns of Antuyo in the mountains and Palestina in the Amazon rainforest . [8] [9] Web won the Sundance Now Audience Award at the 2013 DOC NYC Film Festival. [9]
Kleiman considers himself as a film nerd/snob. [2] He believes that documentaries, like any other kind of film, needs to tell a good story. Documentaries involve real people, which he believes is a plus in audience engagement. [8]
Kirby Bryan Dick is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing Twist of Faith (2005) and The Invisible War (2012). He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival.
Participant Media, LLC is an American film production company founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll, dedicated to entertainment intended to spur social change. The company finances and co-produces film and television content, as well as digital entertainment through its subsidiary SoulPancake, which the company acquired in 2016.
Ondi Doane Timoner is an American filmmaker and the founder and chief executive officer of Interloper Films, a full-service production company located in Pasadena, California. Timoner is a two-time recipient of the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for her documentaries Dig! (2004) and We Live in Public (2009). Both films have been acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art for their permanent collection.
Lucy Walker is an English film director. She has directed the documentaries Devil's Playground (2002), Blindsight (2006), Waste Land (2010), Countdown to Zero (2010), and The Crash Reel (2013). She has also directed the short films The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (2011) and The Lion's Mouth Opens (2014).
Julia Bacha is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker. She has filmed under-documented stories from the Middle East including issues related to Palestine. Her 2021 film, Boycott, explores anti-boycott legislation and related freedom of speech issues.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968.
Eric Daniel Metzgar is a filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. It takes place each January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Nancy Schwartzman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a member of the Directors Guild of America.
Amy Ziering is an American film producer and director. Mostly known for her work in documentary films, she is a regular collaborator of director Kirby Dick; they co-directed 2002's Derrida and 2020's On the Record, with Ziering also producing several of Dick's films.
CNN Films is a motion picture division of CNN under Warner Bros. Pictures. originally launched in 2012. Its first film, Girl Rising premiered in spring 2013 in the United States.
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 16, 2014 until January 26, 2014 in Park City, Utah, United States, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Sundance Resort in Utah. The festival opened with Whiplash directed by Damien Chazelle and closed with musical drama Rudderless directed by William H. Macy.
Web is a 2013 documentary film directed by Michael Kleiman.
Ky Dickens is a filmmaker, writer and director best known for her documentaries Zero Weeks, Sole Survivor, The City That Sold America and Fish out of Water.
Tadashi "Tad" Nakamura is an American documentary filmmaker. He is noted for films about the Asian-American and Japanese-American communities in the United States.
Penny Lane is an American independent filmmaker, known for her documentary films. Her humor and unconventional approach to the documentary form, including the use of archival Super 8 footage and YouTube videos, have earned her critical acclaim.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spans over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
Alysa Nahmias is an American filmmaker and the founder of Ajna Films.
Bonni Cohen is an American documentary film producer and director. She is the co-founder of Actual Films, the production company of the documentaries Athlete A, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, Audrie & Daisy, 3.5 Minutes, The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan and The Rape of Europa. Cohen is the co-founder of the Catapult Film Fund.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)