American Factory ( Arts and Culture)

Netflix- Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar

Summary: This documentary focus on a Chinese owned factory that’s operated in America. The film focuses on the condition of American and Chinese workers in the factory. Though American Factory is very much a story about two different workplace cultures figuring out how to interact, its narrative also fits with Reichert’s interest in documenting the struggles of American radicalism and its conflicts with the country’s capitalist infrastructure. The director’s past Oscar-nominated projects include Union Maids, which was an oral history of women’s efforts to organize in the 1930s, and Seeing Red, which traced the development of the American Communist Party. In these films, as in American Factory, Reichert presents her subjects with remote bluntness; this is not a polemic, but rather an attempt to understand every side of an unhappy situation. The film goes on to show individual living situation and how tough some people have it. This part of the film was focus on the immigrant's worker tough living condition. One of the Chinese workers talk about how he must send money back home to his family, so he’s forced to withstand whatever bad condition he’s in. This film showed how bad people must endure stuff and how a capitalist system never work in anyone favor for a long time.

Response: I feel like everyone should watch this film. Watching this give me a new sense of appreciation for the circumstances that I'm in. School may seem annoying and tedious but at least I know it’ll be rewarding in the future. These people in American factory don’t have that luxury of looking towards the future in these jobs. They are too busy worrying about not losing their jobs in the present. This film also points out how those at the top benefits from those at the bottom at people of the bottom expense. You can see in the film that these higher ups don’t really care for the workers, they just care about their value they bring to the workplace. The higher ups make these people do the dangerous jobs and assign one person to a two person jobs. If that doesn’t show no regard for human life, I don’t know what does. I truly believe that these people are better off finding a job that won’t exploit them like this. I know some time you must do what you must survive but living for a job that doesn’t treat you right isn’t worth it.

Melvin