Director Biography - Vivian Kleiman

Director/Producer Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and a Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship artist. Her recent film as Director/Producer “No Straight Lines” premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, and garnered Grand Jury Award, LA’s OutFest. Broadcast on primetime national PBS Independent Lens, it reached an audience of 1.5 million viewers. From Executive Producer of the Academy Award-nominated “Last Day of Freedom,” to story editor for the Showtime series “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men,” her work is known for tackling challenging subjects and filmic approaches. Kleiman worked with Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs on his landmark films "Ethnic Notions," “Tongues Untied” and “Color Adjustment” and garnered the Organization of American Historians’ Eric Barnouw Award and the International Documentary Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. She was nominated for a national Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement. She has been involved in 9 co-productions with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) for national PBS broadcast. Also an educator, she taught at Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Documentary Film & Video Production for 9 years.

Director Statement

For most of my life, I believed the escape of nearly 7,000 Jewish Danes to Sweden in October 1943—and the Legend of the Yellow Star—were stories of moral clarity. They were the stories I grew up with: proof that ordinary people chose courage, risking their lives to resist fascism. When I began to investigate this history myself, that certainty began to unravel. What I found was not a simple story of heroism, but a deeply uncomfortable truth. The survival of Jewish Danes came at a price—one paid through economic and political collaboration. That realization became the spine of this film. I traced the Legend of the Yellow Star back to its origins and discovered that it was not simply remembered, but carefully constructed—shaped by Danish American business leaders and likely influenced by Edward Bernays, the so-called “father of public relations,” whose methods of persuasion were rooted in Freudian ideas about the unconscious. I read about the wartime diaries of Gunnar Larsen, Denmark’s Minister of Transportation, and learned how he used his public position to expand production at his cement factory in Estonia, where Jewish and Roma forced laborers were exploited. While the Danish Resistance helped Jews escape to Sweden, Larsen profited from a system that depended on their captivity. Most disturbing was what I uncovered about the escape itself. The German SS officer in charge of Denmark not only warned community leaders in advance of the roundup, but ordered German patrol boats into “maintenance,” ensuring the passage to Sweden remained open. Jews were allowed to escape so long as Denmark continued supplying Germany with milk, butter, cheese, pork, and other resources to sustain its troops. This film is my attempt to reckon with what I was taught, what I uncovered, and what it cost—an inquiry into how survival, resistance, and collaboration can coexist in the same story.