Bonnie Sherr Klein (born 1941) is a feminist filmmaker, author and disability rights activist.
Early life and education
Bonnie Sherr Klein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1941 to working class Jewish parents. She attended public schools until high school, when she then attended Akiba Hebrew Academy. She received a bachelor's degree in American studies at Barnard College, and became more active in the Civil Rights and anti-nuclear movements. After a year of teaching high school, she was admitted to Stanford University for their MA program in theatre. There, she attended a presentation by Claude Jutra and Marcel Carrière from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). It inspired her to switched her major from theatre to film. Her thesis film, For All My Students, was completed under the supervision of visiting professor George C. Stoney, and was funded by the US Department of Education.
Upon graduation, she was invited to New York to work on some of Stoney's film projects, and gained experience as a freelance editor.
She and her husband, Michael Klein, immigrated to Montreal in 1967 as resisters to the Vietnam War. Soon after, she began to work with the NFB. Her father died in 1969. As her daughter, Naomi Klein, points out in her latest book Doppelgänger.
Career
John Kemeny hired Klein to work at the NFB's Challenge For Change program. One year later, he resigned and she recommended her mentor, Stoney, who led the program until 1970.
In the Challenge for Change program, Klein co-directed Organizing for Power: The Alinsky Approach (1968), a five-part film series on community organizer Saul Alinsky. With Dorothy Todd Hénaut, she produced the first citizens' community video project, VTR St-Jacques. They provided equipment and training to residents of one of Montreal's poorest neighbourhoods to facilitate community dialogue and organizing. A short documentary was also produced by Klein and Hénaut. Other projects with Challenge for Change include Citizen's Medicine and Little Burgundy.
In 1970, Klein moved to Rochester, New York, and, based on the Challenge for Change model, established Portable Channel, "a community-access media and documentary centre" that was aligned with the guerilla television movement and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1975, she was invited by her Challenge for Change colleague, Kathleen Shannon, to join the newly formed Studio D, the women's unit of the NFB.
As the only government-funded feminist film production agency, Studio D was committed to making films not just about women or by women, but also about social issues from women's point of view. Klein, an avowed feminist, was one of the first film directors assigned to the studio by the NFB. However, due to shortage of funds for the studio and internal politics, she spent a lot of time organizing training programs, developing film series, and advocating for feminist film productions. "Studio D was a total integration of film and the movement. We were inspired by and inspired the movement," she recalls. "It was really heady. Intellectually it was incredibly stimulating. Every idea was a new idea. Discovering the patriarchy behind every corner. The whole movement about violence against women was unheard of. It was just a soup that was constantly bubbling."
In 1981, Klein made what is probably her best-known film, Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography. It went on to become one of the most popular and commercially successful films the NFB ever made.
In 1987, Klein had catastrophic stroke caused by a congenital malformation in her brainstem. She became locked-in, quadriplegic, respirator-dependent, and experienced panic attacks. She spent more than six months in hospital and another three years in formal rehabilitation. She went on permanent disability pension from the NFB and began her work in disability activism, as told in her memoir Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love and Disability (1997) which she co-authored with writer and artist Persimmon Blackbridge. She writes, speaks, consults, and counsels on issues of disability; in particular access, health care, and representation. In 1998, she co-founded kickstART: Disability Arts and Culture, and they held their first festival in 2001.
Klein's most recent film is Shameless: The ART of Disability (2006). She is featured in the film, along with poet and writer Catherine Frazee, humourist David Roche, dancer and choreographer Geoff McMurchy, and Persimmon Blackbridge. Vancouver musician Veda Hille contributed music for the film.