American Factory (美国 工厂; 美國 工廠) is a 2019 American documentary filmed by filmmakers Stephen Bognar and Julia Reichert about the Chinese company Fuyao in Moraine, a city near Dayton, Ohio, which occupies Moraine Assembly, a closed General factory Motors. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. It is distributed by Netflix and is the first film produced by the production company Barack and Michelle Obama, Higher Ground Productions. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Filmed from February 2015 until the end of 2017, Reichert and Bognar gained access to Fuyao filming both at their plants in Ohio and in China. They were inspired to make this film because the events they sought to portray took place at the same moraine assembly plant once occupied by General Motors, which was the central theme of their 2009 Oscar-nominated short documentary, “The Last Truck: GM closing. ” plant.
It was only during the installation process that the directors decided to centralize the experience of the workers themselves during the seizure of the Fuyao plant, which they call the "beating heart of history."
The Chinese-language parts of the film were made easier by the inclusion of two Chinese directors, Itian Zhang and Miji Li, one or both of which would travel to Ohio on a monthly basis. The directors believe that these two are necessary to ensure communication with the Chinese subjects depicted in the film.
The filmmakers adopted the approach of documentary filmmaking on the fly, in which there is no dialogue external to the subject of the film, and the sounds of the factory and the dialogue of workers are priority. In order to focus on this audiovisual approach, the filmmakers introduced better microphones to effectively balance the dialogue between workers and the noise coming from the factory equipment. Voice-overs provided by factory workers were often recorded in their respective homes, regardless of factory settings. According to Bognar, the implementation of the film’s narrative in this way creates the effect of depicting the employee’s internal monologue.
