The Obamas’ first film for Netflix, entitled American Factory, is making waves in China.
Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary is a follow-up to their 2008 short The Last Truck, which traced the last days of a General Motors factory just south of Dayton, Ohio. For this new film, they returned to the small town of Moraine to witness the facility’s apparent rejuvenation under Chinese ownership, after billionaire Cao Dewang swooped in to reopen the plant as part of his automobile windscreen empire Fuyao.
Yet what seemed like a savior story soon turned sour, as Fuyao’s expectations of longer hours, lower pay and no unions set up a major culture clash with its new American workers. The conflict, as the official Netflix blurb has it, “threatens to shatter an American dream.”
The film premiered at Sundance earlier this year, where it scooped a directing award for US documentary and was snapped up by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions company. Continue to read the full article on RADII.
– This article originally appeared on radii.com
