#steven bognar

[filmsfoodandfandom]

AMERICAN FACTORY (2019)

dir. Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar

Have you all thanked your local union organizer today?

[sesiondemadrugada]

American Factory (Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert, 2019).

[kellymagovern]

American Factory (2019) dir. Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert

[jerichopalms]

#25: American Factory (2019, dir. by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert)

[dakotadanger]

In 2008, a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio shut its doors. In 2015, the facility was re-opened by a Chinese company called Fuyao Glass America. It was a huge sign of progress for the unemployed workers of Dayton, for global relations, and for hundreds of Chinese workers who followed their jobs to the United States.

American Factory (2019) is a documentary about this project. It’s an observational film with no narration, and filmmakers were granted free access to film within the factory. There are heartwarming moments of friendship, like when Rob invites Wong and his other Chinese friends to his house for Thanksgiving dinner and a little target practice with his guns. The workers realize that they’re more alike than different. However, the company’s leadership finds trouble in trying to run a Chinese factory like an American one. High-ranking local employees are let go and replaced with Chinese workers. This comes to a head when workers attempt to unionize. Initial support is strong, but a union avoidance agency is hired by the company to scare employees. 

To me, this is the heart of the film. We have a certain degree of worker’s rights in this country, but big employers, whether they’re from here or China, will take those rights away if it means they can increase profits. This documentary shows what it’s like to work in a factory, the toll it takes on the body and mind, and what it means to have a voice in your workplace. I highly recommend this film for anyone interested in unions, factories here and abroad, and global relations with China. 

[oldfilmsflicker]

new-to-me #149 - American Factory 

[thefilmstage]

We talk with the directors of American Factory (now on Netflix) about capitalism, communism, and capturing a U.S.-China culture clash with delicacy:

It’s a different culture. We are made up of individuals. We’re individualistic. We all came from somewhere else. It’s that cowboy/cowgirl culture. It’s much more collective over there. You keep hearing the words harmonious society–they are striving for a harmonious society. Now maybe that's fluffy word for conformist. But there’s a sense that they all really support the company happy, they’re having a great time. Even on the factory floor. Even with the long hours there’s a huge sense of “We’re trying to make this happen.” They are much more patriotic in a real way. If you think about it, China only started pulling out poverty and starvation in the 1980s. That's not very long ago. People’s parents were living in rural poverty as opposed to our grandparents, who had good jobs. 

Continue reading.

[pigballoon]

American Factory

(Julia Reichert & Steven Bognar, 2019)

Having watched too many movies lately where potentially interesting stories, often ones based on real life events, find themselves turning out as thorough disappointments in their translation to the big screen and overt simplifying, suffering from a experience destroying, propaganda amplifying reduction to black and white morality, it is a very great relief to see that at least in the world of documentary cinema there are still those that are fighting to the good fight, and realizing that shades of grey are the best way to amplify even the simplest of stories and turn them into complex emotional experiences.

Reichert and Bognar, two long time documentarians of the American midwest find themselves covering the better part of a decade in Dayton in their latest, from General Motors closure of their plant there in 2008, briefly featured as the movies opening, and layering the movie from the off with a sense of of tragedy and impending doom, and from there they get into how the place was reopened by a Chinese company to such great promise and joy, and all the complications that followed.

The brilliance of the movie is how it gives voice to all sides, and all points of view, how wide ranging it proves to be in its less than 2 hour running time covering this story from most angles you could imagine, and displaying a sense of empathy for all, even the big bad, union despising man at the top. It manages to find in this factory a wonderful mix of individuals from the floor to the office, each with their story to tell, each with their own outlook on things, and together they make up this tragic and miserable look at the world, enlivened only by their own human ability to smile in the face of their own doom, as two worlds become one, soon realize it’s easier said than done, and the machines move into the divide.