A scene from American Factory Photo: Courtesy of Douban

The first documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, American Factory, debuted on Netflix on Wednesday. The film documents the story between US workers at an Ohio General Motors plant that was closed down and their Chinese boss who bought the factory and brought it back to life. 

The former US president and first lady founded film studio Higher Ground Productions in partnership with Netflix in 2018. American Factory, which is being distributed by Netflix, first premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the Directing Award: US Documentary. 

Back to life 

In Dayton, Ohio, a General Motors (GM) factory was shut down following the 2008 financial crisis, leading to thousands of people losing their jobs. 

Directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar are no strangers to this type of situation as they are known for their 2009 documentary The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, which won them an Oscar nomination. American Factory is a sequel to this work as it once again looks at a closing GM plant, but this time focuses on its return to life after Chinese company Fuyao Glass America buys it in 2014.     

For American Factory, the director couple spent three years shooting and collecting more than 1,200 hours of video footage. 

The first part of the film shows the town's optimism as around 2,000 jobs are created by the reopened factory and new technology and management systems are introduced. The US and newly introduced Chinese employees happily get to learn about each other's culture and lives as they go fishing and spend holidays such as Thanksgiving together. 

Yet as time goes by, conflict caused by differences in work culture and business practices begins to emerge in the factory. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Reichert noted that "the Chinese style is more direct. It's not so much 'Good job!' and 'How you doing?' It's more like 'I need you to do this' or 'Don't do that.'" 

As the film continues, some US workers begin complaining about the heavy workload and condescending tone of their Chinese boss, while their Chinese counterparts grow dissatisfied with the low efficiency and lack of dedication of the US workers. However, by the end of the documentary, the conflicts appeared to have been alleviated, as the factory begins turning a profit at the beginning of 2018.  

Reaction in China

With Netflix providing subtitles in 28 languages, the work has been going global. As the film focuses on the cultural differences in work and business between US and Chinese workers, the movie has also caused viewers in China to take notice. 

The documentary has an 8.5/10 from 249 reviews on Douban, a Chinese media review platform. Some reviewers said they were intrigued by the drama and the conflicts between the two different types of factory management and how these conflicts were resolved to some extent against the background of globalization. Some praised the film for delving deep into the issue of xenophobia. On China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo, the film has sparked numerous topics, with total views for these discussions reaching the 200 million mark. 

"It was about the conflicts and compromise between [different] cultures, regimes, ideologies and development of technology," wrote one netizen in a review on Douban. 


Newspaper headline: ‘American Factory’