Michael Kleiman

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.

Life Kleiman was born in Long Island, NY. 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. This interest led him to making his own films in middle school and into high school. He discovered documentary making at college, seeing it as a way to combine his love for cinema with a desire to promote social change, with the aim of learning how policy is created and evaluated to relate this to filmmaking.

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.

Kleiman’s second documentary feature is called Web, (2013) which he directed, co-edited and co-produced. Kleiman spent ten months living in Peru, dividing his time in the towns of Antuyo in the mountains and Palestina in the Amazon rainforest . Web won the Sundance Now Audience Award at the 2013 DOC NYC Film Festival.

Artistry

Kleiman considers himself as a film nerd/snob. 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.