American Factory

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert (2019, U.S., 115 min.)

Is a post-post-industrial America possible? Is an industrial renaissance possible in the part of the country (like Pennsylvania) too often dismissed as “the Rust Belt”? Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s powerful American Factory starts to explore these questions through the story of a single new auto glass factory built by a Chinese billionaire in Ohio in the shell of a closed GM factory. The optimism that greets this new arrival soon gives way to clashes of culture–both corporate and otherwise–as workers grateful for any industrial jobs confront what a new working culture entails. But it’s not just American workers confronting new Chinese philosophies about work. Chinese workers are sent to Ohio, separated from their families for two years, to learn how Americans see and understand work. In the end, the film asks what the role of work is in our lives and what the impacts of globalization are on people’s quality of life. What is meaningful work? Must the choice either be unemployment or living only as cog within the crushing machine of capitalism? 2020 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Feature Film.

Filmmakers joined us for a post-film Q&A via Zoom.