About Jim Klein

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 . . .  »read more

Films by Jim Klein

Jim Klein’s pioneering documentary films have garnered two Academy Award nominations, national PBS broadcasts, screenings and awards at top tier festivals, reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice, Time Magazine, Ms. Magazine and scores of other national periodicals and academic journals, and can be found in the permanent collections of hundreds of university libraries.

Image from Growing Up Female, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein)

Growing Up Female

Growing Up Female is the very first film of the modern women’s movement. Produced in 1971, it spurred both controversy and exhilaration. It was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society…»more

Image from Union Maids, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein) and Julia Reichert

Union Maids

Sitdowns, scabs, goon squads, unemployment, hunger marches, red baiting and finally the energetic birth of the CIO–the 1930s were a landmark period for the American labor movement. Union Maids is the story of three women who lived the history and make it come alive today…»more

Image from Seeing Red, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein)

Seeing RedStories of American Communists

A film about passionate commitment, numbing disillusionment and renewal, Seeing Red is an informed look at the hopes and aspirations of more than a million people who joined the American Communist Party between the Great Depression and the Cold War, and were transformed by their experience…»more

Image from Taken for a Ride, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein)

Taken for a Ride

The tragic and little known story of an auto and oil industry campaign, led by General Motors, to buy and dismantle streetcar lines. Across the nation, tracks were torn up—sometimes overnight—and diesel buses placed on city streets…»more

Image from Letter to the Next Generation, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein)

Letter to the Next Generation

A personal exploration of student apathy vs activism at the dawn of the Reagan era. Jim Klein, a student of the 1960s, returns to college to take an eye-opening look at the values and aspirations of college students, probing behind the stereotypes to ponder the forces that were changing the country and the campuses in the early 1990s…»more

Image from METHADONE: An American Way of Dealing, a film by Jim Klein (James Klein)

METHADONEAN AMERICAN WAY OF DEALING

In 1975, more money was spent on in it than on any other form of drug treatment. It is a government sanctioned, medically approved strategy for dealing with a deeply rooted social problem. And it was not working…»more

Films Edited by Jim Klein

Films edited by Jim Klein have received Academy Award Nominations, a Prime Time Emmy Award for Documentary and won numerous awards at leading international film festivals, and have been nationally broadcast on POV, Independent Lens and HBO and internationally broadcast in more than a dozen countries.

Selected Documentary Films Edited by Jim Klein

Fiction Films Edited by Jim Klein