American Factory                             5 stars

Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert produced an excellent documentary in American Factory that came out in 2019. In 2008 near Dayton, Ohio a GM auto plant closed down forcing thousands of workers to lose their jobs. Then in 2015, a Chinese billionaire named Cao announced that a new plant producing automobile windshields would open on the site and would offer jobs to the community. The filmmakers began following some of the workers, both American and Chinese in meetings, the factory floor and their homes. Through interviews and exchanges between counterparts, the cultural clash between the individualistic Americans and the monolithic Chinese is stark. We see how the corporate culture values maximum production at the cost of worker safety and how this impacts the lives of the workers. At the same time we see successful interactions between the cultures where workers come to see and understand one another and that their difficulties transcend national identity. There is a thread following a union organizing effort on the part of some workers and the corporation’s determination to avoid unionization at all costs. Some of the workers will lose their jobs before the film ends. There is a segment where some of the American supervisors are taken to the company headquarters in China. The contrast between nationalities is comical and illustrative of the divide between the societies. It is likely that the filmmakers didn’t know what they were getting into when they started the project, but they have captured the effect of globalization of industry on workers and the unbridgeable gap between American and Chinese cultures. The film won the Documentary Best Directing Award at Sundance, 2019 and the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for 2019.