Following a sold-out world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival — which continues through Feb. 3 in Utah— the first reviews are rolling in for American Factory, directed by Yellow Springs residents Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, who was recently honored with the International Documentary Association’s 2018 Career Achievement Award.
The documentary follows a Chinese-run company — Fuyao Glass America — opening a factory inside what was once a General Motors plant; the latter was the focus of the filmmakers’ Oscar-nominated short The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant. When the GM plant shuttered in 2008, nearly 3,000 were left jobless. Fuyao came with a promise of new jobs — over 1,500, according to The New York Times.
As American Factory explores, those initial hopes for job growth came with setbacks as the two cultures clashed.
IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn gave the 115-minute film a B+, writing that the ordeal “unfolds as a fascinating tragicomedy about the incompatibility of American and Chinese industries.”
Those incompatibilities included multiple health and safety violations, complaints of being overworked and even a lawsuit from a former employee who believes they were unfairly let go. But, as the IndieWire review discusses, another narrative emerges in the documentary. While the American workers are “baffled by their Eastern peers’ cultish work ethic,” the Chinese workers at the plant complain that the Americans are “lazy, talk too much and don’t live up to the company’s high standards.”
Though Kohn states that the “movie never lacks for insights into the nature of the disconnect,” he also notes that observations made were, at times, redundant.
Screen Daily‘s Anthony Kaufman made similar points, comparing the film to Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me. He praised the film as “skillfully constructed.”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Fienberg gave a less-favorable review, citing that “complex ideas about the American Dream are introduced but don’t always come together.”
He drew comparisons to Ron Howard’s 1986 drama-comedy Gung Ho, also citing that American Factory “is too earnest and well-intentioned to fall prey to racism, but there’s a vein of xenophobia baked into its premise that lingers and leaves more of a bad taste than it should. It’s a two-sided xenophobia that doesn’t get any deeper than ‘Well, both sides came into this with some bad faith.'”
Despite the criticism, American Factory also landed on The Hollywood Reporter’s Sundance “hot list,” alongside 11 other films.
Another film with regional ties made the list — Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; the flick follows the infamous serial Ted Bundy (Zac Efron) — who confessed to 30 murders in the 1970s — and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer (Lily Collins), who stayed with Bundy throughout the trial. Last February, it shot multiple scenes in Greater Cincinnati, primarily in Northern Kentucky. If you’re curious, the trailer dropped this weekend. Watch it here.
A short film called Old Haunt directed and written by Andre Hyland, an Indian Hill High School and University of Cincinnati graduate, was also screened; now based in L.A, he plays an acting role in another Sundance film, The Death of Dick Long.
This article appears in Jan 23-30, 2019.
