But it just takes time to really be there before people say, “Okay, I guess you’re part of this now.” Alissa Wilkinson We were going to try to include everyone’s point of view, even if those points of view didn’t agree with each other. We had to tell everyone again and again that this was an independent film. We had five camera people going in there regularly, following different people who work in that plant. We filmed for basically three years, from February 2015 to the end of December 2017, and we’ve got over 1,200 hours of footage. We went there hundreds and hundreds of times. The way you do that is by showing up again and again and again. Every single person we filmed had to give us the okay to hang out with them, and then we had to build trust and relationships with everybody. We had great access from the company itself, but that doesn’t mean we have access to any individual who’s working on that factory floor. But even so, you had to build relationships with the people who work in the factory and manage the company in order to make the kind of film you did. It definitely has the feel of a documentary where the filmmakers know the community, rather than just parachuting in to make a movie. Whatever happens - whatever the story is going to be - it’s going to be really interesting and relevant, and we have a close-up view of it because we live here. We were also going to see the impact of a Chinese owner and Chinese management on our proud but beaten-down blue-collar workers.
American factory how to#
They had to learn about our culture, had to learn how to cut the grass, how our grocery stores and shopping malls work. We realized that we could see up close and intimately what was going to happen when hundreds of Chinese people came over here to work - to our town, to take up residence here. General Motors left our town, and was then bought by a Chinese billionaire. It’s a big thing that we all are concerned with, and we wanted to see how it was going to play out. We all know that there’s been a rivalry between China and the US for most of the 21st century. The whole story takes place in our hometown, Dayton, Ohio, and in a similar city in China. What drove you to make this one? Julia Reichert You’d previously made a short documentary, The Last Truck, about the closing of the GM plant in late 2008. Reichert and Bognar shooting on the factory floor. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. I spoke with Reichert and Bognar by phone about how they built trust with workers and management, the cultural challenges they observed on the factory floor, and what they learned about the future of work in a globalized economy. They both live in Dayton, and in their 2009 short documentary The Last Truck, they captured the closing of the GM plant and its effects on the surrounding community, mostly through interviews with workers who were losing their jobs. Reichert (whose 50-year career in documentary filmmaking has often examined the American working class) and Bognar, who often work together, knew what they were doing in choosing this factory as their subject. And when the workers at Fuyao Glass America decide to unionize, trouble follows. Differences in American and Chinese ideas about loyalty to your employer, safety on the factory floor, working overtime, and much more come to the foreground. At times, it’s a bit humorous at others, it’s more grave. The film tracks American and Chinese workers and managers through a years-long period of adjustment, some of it quite rocky. (It’s also the first film from Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, which has partnered with Netflix to distribute a slate of programming.) Daytonians who struggled after they were laid off from GM rejoice when they are rehired by the new company, but soon find that their expectations about labor practices and corporate culture clash with the new management’s ideals.Īmerican Factory, the first film in the Obamas’ Netflix slate, is one of the year’s best docs And as you might guess, there are some bumps in the road.ĭirected by veteran documentarians Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory chronicles the plant’s reopening and the years after it, mostly in fly-on-the-wall fashion. The story is yet another chapter in American manufacturing’s inexorable march toward globalization, and it’s told in intimate, fascinating detail in the new documentary American Factory, which is now streaming on Netflix. Chinese managers were brought to Dayton to supervise the Americans. Then, in 2014, a Chinese company called Fuyao Glass reopened the factory to serve as its American arm, and hired a workforce, including many former GM employees, to make automotive glass. Its closing left thousands of people out of work. In December 2008, the last truck rolled off the assembly line of the GM plant in Dayton, Ohio.
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