American Factory

American Factory (2019) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, set inside the shell of a shuttered General Motors plant in Ohio. A Chinese billionaire reopens it as an auto-glass factory and hires two thousand local workers, and at first everyone is just glad to be employed again.

Then the friction starts. Pace, discipline, safety habits, unions, an eight-hour shift against a twelve-hour one — two work cultures pull apart on nearly every point. The camera sits in on shareholder meetings at Fuyao and at the dinner table of an American welder without picking a side. A harder question surfaces underneath it all: what happens when robots come cheaper than either workforce.

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert filmed the plant over several years, and the patience paid off — it won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It also marked the first Netflix release from Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground company. Rare for a film about globalization, it skips the slogans and just watches the people on both sides. Stream American Factory (2019) online on iFILM.