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directors
Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert
Availability
Select theaters and Netflix August 21
In 2008, documentary filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert filmed the last days of a GM factory in Ohio for the Oscar-nominated short film "The Last Truck". Nearly ten years later, they returned to the small town of Moraine, just south of Dayton. to film the same installation after reopening it as a glass factory run by the Chinese manufacturing company Fuyao. The new owners mainly hired local workers, bringing unemployed experienced workers back to work alongside Chinese workers familiar with the Fuyao process.
It was the most positive part of the story, put forward by politicians and local news. Less encouraging? Americans were asked to work longer than usual, for about half of their wages, in sometimes dangerous conditions. And they were told that if they were trying to unionize, the plant would be shut down.
The documentary by Bognar and Reichert American factory covers the disillusionment that developed during the early years of the Fuyao project in Ohio. The Chinese are initially excited to take advantage of the unique qualities and opportunities of the United States. They are told that this is "a place to give free rein to their personality" and that they enjoy the freedom to shoot with firearms and – at least in theory – to openly criticize authority. Americans like to learn new skills, be part of a team and earn a regular salary. But the leaders of Fuyao are quick to realize that workers in Ohio will never be as determined to meet quotas as Chinese workers. Americans are alarmed to learn that Fuyao executives do not want to be bothered by reminders about local environmental and safety regulations.
Filmmakers do not describe this story in terms of heroes and villains. They do not take lightly the blue-collar Americans who vote against their own interests, nor do they describe the Chinese as faceless drones. There is a de facto quality, much closer to the two classics of Barbara Kopple's labor relations Harlan County, United States and American dream than the stirrer Michael Moore. American factory is a detailed, sometimes gloomy picture of the situation in a manufacturing sector that, in two decades of the twenty-first century, uses less and less human capital.
American factory excels mainly in the way he takes seriously all the people involved in this conflict. Bognar and Reichert's approach is essentially to fly on the walls: just stay behind and watch the action in boardrooms and in the factory – and possibly on the picket lines. Extraordinary access was granted to them, thanks to the public relations representatives who undoubtedly considered this film as the happy ending of the story begun by "The Last Truck". They have also won the trust of their subjects, who frequently turn to the camera and speak honestly to the camera. evaluations of the winless situations in which they find themselves.
What emerges is the study of a potentially insurmountable cultural divide, where social expectations and the forces of history have shaped very different conceptions of what "work" is. There are disturbing similarities between the two factions: the Chinese, who have reshaped their old Communist Party hymns and turned into a merry propaganda of big business; and the Americans, who protest in front of the factory with placards and union songs that are like remnants of a once flourishing and long-weakened institution. But if the Chinese miss their families and cherish their leave as much as their American counterparts, they are also conditioned to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
At one point, one of the watch supervisors on the American side sympathized with a Chinese counterpart, complaining that most of his Ohio residents are there to make money, not glass. But like American factory The same goes for the Chinese. It's just that the Chinese are going to sleep six in an apartment in Dayton, sending most of their paychecks back to spouses and children that they will only see two weeks a year. The crew from Ohio, meanwhile, will do just enough to live alone (provided it has no medical problems). Everyone, regardless of their origin or values, works hard. By telling their stories in a fun and persuasive way, Bognar and Reichert make the point that they all deserve better.
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