Many of the workers have suffered since the closing of the G.M. In May, I saw the film at the MOMA screening, which Bognar and Reichart also attended.
American factory series#
(Their list includes a bio-pic of Frederick Douglass, a drama about the challenges faced by women and people of color in postwar New York, and a series that will teach preschool-aged children about nutrition.) The film is also an example of a new category of entertainment in the Trump era: stories about the economic dynamics that have led the country to its current state of political polarization. The film is the first of Higher Ground’s slate of upcoming releases, and it offers a glimpse of the kinds of subtly political projects that the Obamas will be backing. “American Factory” premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and, shortly after, Barack and Michelle Obama’s newly formed production company, Higher Ground Productions, joined the project.
“We made a film about kids fighting cancer, and there were more tears with the factory closing,” Bognar told me. In 2009, she and Bognar produced what turned out to be a preview of “American Factory,” called “The Last Truck,” a forty-minute documentary that chronicled the emotional final days of G.M.’s Moraine factory. The film was made by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, who live about fifty-five miles from Columbus and were described, at a recent screening of the documentary at the Museum of Modern Art, as “the godparents of independent film in Ohio.” Reichert has been making films about the lives of regular American people for decades. On August 21st, Netflix will release “American Factory,” a documentary about the plant’s second life. A Chinese investor named Cho Tak Wong (he also goes by Cao Dewang) took over the factory and reopened it as an American outpost of Fuyao Glass, his successful auto-glass manufacturer. Then, in 2014, a glimmer of hope appeared. Automation and the outsourcing of jobs further depressed wages and fuelled unemployment. The plant was larger than the Pentagon its closure had a devastating impact on the local economy and contributed to a period of severe decline. In a familiar scene that has played out in industrial cities across the country, the workers had recently learned that their plant, near Dayton, was closing, leaving around two thousand people without jobs the white truck that they were photographing would be the facility’s last. that had just rolled off the line, snapping photos and holding back tears. On December 23, 2008, a group of workers at a General Motors truck-assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, gathered around a white S.U.V.
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