“American Factory” and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary American Factory, a project purchased by Netflix and distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. It is a stunning and poignant movie about how a Chinese company comes to establish an auto glass factory in Moraine, Ohio, on the site of a former GM production plant. In light of American Factory’s critical success, this essay focuses on the contemporary capacity of the documentary form to capture the specific logic of socioeconomic and geopolitical contradictions. This is explored through the rubric of neoliberalism, especially as it complicates how a story of a factory might be told. It also links the style of documenting workers to a longer cinematic history.