A Grain of Truth

Synopsis

In A GRAIN OF TRUTH filmmaker Vivian Kleiman challenges the story of the singularity of Denmark’s resistance to the Germans by presenting a complex Denmark – both its bravery and its blemishes. This personal essay film takes the viewer on a disturbing journey through World War II history, deconstructing deeply entrenched legends that have masked a far more nuanced wartime experience: the willingness of Danish companies to expand and engage in morally questionable behavior. Ultimately, the film explores how stories of Danish heroism eclipse a darker past. 

About the Director

Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award–winning documentary filmmaker whose work is distinguished by its bold cinematic style and engagement with complex social histories. She directed and produced No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at Sheffield Doc/Fest and AFI DOCS, winning the Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize at OutFest, and the NLGJA Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism before airing nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens. Kleiman is also executive producer of the Academy Award–nominated short Last Day of Freedom.

A longtime collaborator of pioneering Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs, Kleiman served as additional cinematographer on his landmark Tongues Untied and supervised the completion of Riggs’s final film, Black Is… Black Ain’t. Their work together garnered the Peabody Award, the Eric Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the International Documentary Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. Kleiman also helped establish Riggs’s production company, Signifyin’ Works, and currently serves as President of its Board of Directors, which proudly created the Marlon T. Riggs Fellowship at UC Berkeley School of Journalism—the first U.S. fellowship established to honor a documentary filmmaker.

As a consultant and writer, Kleiman served as a story consultant on Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics & Men, the four-part Showtime documentary series directed by Sacha Jenkins (2019). She was also a writer on a feature-length documentary produced by Strike Anywhere Films, the production company founded by Barry Jenkins (2018). Earlier, she worked as consulting producer on Something Ventured, an 85-minute documentary directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller that aired on PBS in 2011.

An educator as well as an artist, Kleiman taught for nine years as adjunct faculty in Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Documentary Film & Video Production, mentoring first-year students from concept through completion of 16mm documentary films. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Fleishhacker Foundation, which awarded her a prestigious invitational Eureka Fellowship. In recent years, Kleiman has expanded her practice into civic media and historical inquiry. In 2024, she created outthevote.com, a social media campaign encouraging queer Gen Z voters on college campuses, amplified by influencers including George Takei and reaching millions of screens. In 2025, she completed A Grain of Truth, a short film interrogating a long-standing myth about Denmark during World War II, revealing a more complex narrative of courage, compromise, and moral ambiguity