At the end of 2014, a Chinese billionaire named Cao Dewang bought the General Motors factory in Dayton, Ohio. His plan was to turn the closed plant into the US outlet of Fuyao, his global windscreen and automobile glass empire. This would involve bringing staff over from China to work side by side on the factory floor with their American counterparts, training them and creating around 2,000 jobs.
“We read it in the newspapers!” says Julia Reichert, mimicking the optimism the town felt. “The plant’s going to reopen! Somebody bought it. We’re manufacturing again. Wow!”
Six years earlier, Reichert and her husband, Steven Bognar, filmed the last car rolling off the production line at GM. Their desperately sad Oscar-nominated short The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant felt like a 40-minute death knell for the American dream. The couple live just 25 minutes’ drive from the factory and, in the years since its closure, they watched the living standards of former employees plummet.
“We saw them lose houses,” says Bognar. “We saw them getting jobs at warehouse distribution centres for $8 an hour with no benefits, no healthcare. There were a number of suicides. People said to us, ‘I’m never going to work in fast food.’ Two years later, they’re working in fast food at 40 years old. These people used to be very proud. They worked hard factory jobs but they made good money.”
So when Fuyao arrived in town, Reichert and Bognar switched their cameras back on, little knowing they would be filming at the factory for three years, amassing 1,200 hours of footage. The themes of their fly-on-the-wall documentary American Factory, which is on Netflix from Wednesday, are globalisation and US-China rivalry. But really it is a heart-wrenching story about ordinary people, made with care for their lives and feelings.
It’s a low-key film made by low-key directors, but they have suddenly found themselves thrust into the spotlight thanks to their producers – Barack and Michelle Obama. American Factory is the first film released by Higher Ground, the former first couple’s production company, after signing a deal with Netflix to make TV series and movies touching on such issues as race, class, democracy and civil rights.
Back in Ohio, Reichert and Bognar were fascinated by the idea of a Chinese factory opening in the rustbelt. This was before Donald Trump got elected, but there was already unease about the rise of China as a global superpower. Locally, people wondered how Chinese workers would get along in small-town America. “You knew something was gonna happen,” says Reichert. “We didn’t know what.”
What did happen, initially, was heart-warming. For the first 20 minutes, American Factory is a light-hearted culture-clash comedy. Workers newly arrived from China sit down for cultural orientation classes. “Welcome to America where you can let your individuality shine,” they’re told. “You can even joke about the president.” A Chinese worker good-naturedly makes fun of his American co-workers. “They’re pretty slow, they have fat fingers.”
Bognar says everyone laughed a lot in the early days. “The fumbling of two cultures trying to get to know each other was charming. It was all imbued with such goodwill. Seeing these burly Americans going fishing side by side with the Chinese guys. It was adorable.” There’s even cross-cultural bromance – between Harley-riding US furnace worker Rob and his supervisor Wong. “I think the world of him, he’s like my brother,” sniffs Rob, who invites 13 Chinese workers to his house for Thanksgiving dinner.
A sunny, hopeful mood dawns. Jill, a middle-aged woman who lost her job and her homeafter the closure, has been living in her sister’s basement. “I’ve struggled to get back to the middle-class again,” she says. When Jill gets a position as a forklift-operator, she can finally afford to rent her own apartment. Fuyao typically pays around $12 an hour plus benefits. “That’s less than the $29 or $30 that a lot of folks used to make,” says Bognar. “But it’s still the best game in town.”
Reichert and Bognar have quietly been going about the business of making documentaries for decades, joining forces in the 1980s. Their films have often been about the American working class – “the folks who really do the work of the world,” says Reichert. “You don’t see them on TV or in the movies. Maybe a stereotype sometimes.”
One reason why they’ve remained in the midwest is that they like to be close to their subjects. “Our neighbours are the people we make films about,” says Reichert. In Dayton, adds Bognar, you can still feel a sense of community. It hit home earlier this month after the mass shooting outside a nightclub that left nine dead. “It’s like everyone’s suddenly a neighbour,” he continues. “And obviously, that was always there, but now it’s even stronger. As film-makers, we don’t get to go to parties or premieres. But the trade-off of being in LA, and going to cool parties, doesn’t seem worth it.” They’re a bit like Michael Moore minus the ego and shameless self-publicity: you’d never catch them in front of the camera.
Did they witness any racism in the factory? No, says Bognar. “Honestly. We didn’t. I mean, there were frustrations and anger by the end, but I don’t think it was racially based. It was more about how people were being treated, you know, and in the end, the cultural differences.”
The sunny mood goes south when profits fail to materialise quickly enough for Fuyao boss Cao Dewang (known in the company as Chairman Cao). Soon, everyone chafes under pressure from the top. The Chinese accuse their American colleagues of being slow and lazy. What, you only work eight hours a day? “Can’t we force them to work overtime?” asks one bemused supervisor. In China, staff don’t get weekends off, often taking just two days’ leave a month. The Americans file complaints about unsafe working conditions. One says he’s seen a Chinese colleague pouring chemicals down the drain.
The workers call an election to decide whether to unionise. Chairman Cao brings in mega expensive consultants to persuade staff to reject this proposal. Jill the forklift operator, finally living in her own flat, is fired after becoming a union supporter. Promised wage rises don’t materialise. Staff are expected to work faster and put in overtime.
Reichert says you could see the cultural differences kicking in on the factory floor: “The Chinese style is more direct. It’s not so much ‘Good job!’ and ‘How you doing?’ It’s more like ‘I need you to do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’. These American workers who had been through so much already, they had a sense the Chinese supervisors didn’t respect them. I would say the most important factor was the question of respect.”
The Fuyao plant has been profitable since the beginning of 2018. But I wonder if what we see in the film is a race to the bottom for workers’ rights in the globalised economy? Reichert believes so: “We still stay in touch with a lot of workers. They have mandatory Saturdays and mandatory overtime. Sometimes, they don’t get notice of it until a few hours before they have to work. So I feel, yeah, we’re becoming a low-wage country, which is a little bit shocking for an American to hear.”
As a side-note, Bognar adds that, as a made-in-America product, the glass at the Fuyao factory will be exempt from President Trump’s car industry tariffs. “The chairman seemed to have a lot of prescience there,” he says.
The traditionally blue-collar midwest has become a battleground for the heart and soul of America. On election night in 2016, Ohio was the first swing state to be declared for the Republicans. The film-makers kept their cameras running. “There were Trump rallies in Dayton. We filmed people watching the inauguration of Trump on their phones during their lunchbreak. We filmed a Chinese guy watching the debate between Hillary and Trump in which Trump says China is raping America. The face of this Chinese guy! But editing in 2018, it just felt like the whole election drama was yesterday’s news, so we took it all out.”
American Factory premiered to positive reviews in January at the Sundance film festival, earning the duo a directing award. It is already being talked up as an Oscar contender. It was at Sundance that representatives from Higher Ground saw the movie. And after watching it remotely, the Obamas came on board as producers. Reichert and Bognar had to keep shtum for three months until the announcement in May of seven Obama projects for Netflix, including a biopic about the 19th-century US abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and a series for kids about healthy food.
American Factory is a high-minded documentary that treats all of its subjects with respect. You can see the appeal to the Obamas. What feedback did Barack and Michelle give the directors? Reichert answers carefully – my guess is that she has been briefed to boredom by publicists. “They told us they appreciated a film that gives a voice to working people. They’re both from humble beginnings. Her dad was a working-class guy. I think they related to the people in the film.
“The Obamas chose the name Higher Ground as it’s very indicative of what they’re interested in, where their interests lie. They want to listen carefully to all sides. They are great storytellers. They have both written really good books. And I think we look at this huge rivalry, this huge controversy between the US and China on a very human level. What you see is how globalisation is playing out in real life.”
The Obama connection, along with Netflix’s global reach, is giving the film-makers a platform they never dreamed of before. “Netflix has translated the film into something like 28, 29 different languages,” Bognar says. “It’ll be all over the world.”
What about back home in Dayton? Do the pair feel optimistic about the future of their city? Yes, they reply. “We see the resilience in our community again and again. Our town recently endured a mass shooting, two months after several tornadoes ripped across Dayton, killing one person, destroying houses and inflicting over $400m in damage. Our community is scrappy, it doesn’t give up. And that keeps us optimistic.”
• American Factory launches on Netflix on 21 August.
