‘American Factory’ Directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar Explain Why They Cut Trump From Their Doc

Donald Trump is never mentioned by name in American Factory, a new Netflix documentary that began streaming today. That’s quite a feat for an intimate portrait of blue-collar employees who find themselves side by side with Chinese workers, after a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned GM plant in Ohio in 2016. In fact, one would think you’d have to be actively trying to avoid topics like the 2016 election, Trump’s promise to bring back manufacturing jobs to Ohio, and his ongoing trade war with China in order for the subjects to not come up.

…and that’s exactly what co-directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar did. That’s not to say the filmmakers didn’t talk about Trump while filming. (And there’s also the fact that they filmed in 2016 and 2017 before the trade war was making headlines.) But once upon a time, the president was a big storyline in American Factory.

“We filmed the whole lead-up to the election, the election, and rallies in Ohio,” Reichert said. “All kinds of rallies. There was a Trump rally at the airport that we filmed. There were people in the film who were vocally pro-Trump. There was even a character who called herself Debby Trump—a very interesting character who was six-foot-one, had been a Las Vegas show girl, and was a union supporter.”

So what happened? “We decided that the film is not about the political scene,” Reichert said. And so, all that footage was left on the editing room floor.

There is no one better than Reichert and Bognar to tell the story of the Fuyao Glass plant in Dayton, OH. The co-directors—who are also a long-term couple—already covered the former GM plant in their Oscar-nominated 2009 doc, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant. As Dayton natives themselves, they looked at that empty factory day after day. “It was a symbol of the devastation of our community,” said Reichert. (Both directors were understandably shaken and distraught over the recent shooting in their hometown, which occurred two days before our interview and killed 10 people. Thankfully, they said, no one in their families or featured in the documentary was hurt.)

News broke that a Chinese buyer had acquired the factory and planned to open an American branch of his Chinese glass manufacturing company, Fuyao, and would bring thousands of manufacturing jobs back to the area. Their interest was peaked. When their friends at a local economic development company asked the duo to make a film about the factory’s reopening—an “exciting” film that would, in Reichert’s words, contrast the “sad film about the plant closing” they made in 2009—they said yes. With three conditions.

“No money from the company at all,” Reichert said. “I think [Fuyao] thought they were going to pay us to make the film, but we don’t do that. We have to have total access to management, workers, engineers, everybody. And full editorial control. We said, ‘That’s our conditions,’ and it came back yes, so we started filming.”

“There’s not that many American corporations that would, if any, would do that,” noted Bognar. “But [Cao Dewang, the chairman of Fuyao] is really established in China. He’s in the latter part of his career. He doesn’t have a lot to prove to anyone.”

Despite an optimistic opening ceremony speech that is relayed to the newly-hired Americans via translator, tensions are high from the get-go between Cao and his workers. He falls naturally into his role as the film’s villain. In one scene, as Cao examines his new factory, he takes issue with the placement of a fire alarm on the wall, a design flaw he blames on his American VP, Dave Burrows (simply “Dave” in the film), despite Burrows’s protests that the alarm is required by law to be at that height.

“He’s brought back jobs to people who were desperate for jobs, so that’s not villainous,” Bognar said. “But then, the jobs weren’t what everyone hoped they would be. They weren’t paying anywhere near what people used to make. The work is hard, and the expectations are high. The Chinese leadership wanted more and more out of the Americans, so then resentment started to grow and frustration started to grow.”

These frustrations eventually lead to a unionization effort, which becomes the driving narrative of the film, placing Cao and the Fuyao management even more firmly in the role of the adversaries. At one point, shockingly, Fuyao chief executive Jeff Liu freely says he fired workers because of their involvement in the union efforts, which is illegal in the U.S. under the National Labor Relations Act. We won’t spoil how the film ends, but it’s not exactly Norma Rae.

With all that, there wasn’t much room left for a Trump narrative, which Bognar said “wasn’t urgent enough for this film. The 2016 election has been hashed and rehashed and rehashed. Aren’t we tired of it?”

“We’re much more interested [in Trump] now,” Reichert admitted, “because of tariffs and trade wars that did not exist when we were editing the film. But I still would make that same decision.”

That said, though it didn’t make it into the film, the directors were happy to offer their own perspective on how the attitude toward Trump is shifting (or not) in their hometown. “His secureness is not as secure,” Bognar said. “But I wouldn’t say it’s gone. He still has a lot of support. There are people who really believe he’s getting stuff done, even though it’s not necessarily for them.”

Despite the lack of politics (or maybe because of it), American Factory caught the attention of Barack and Michelle Obama, who selected the film after its Sundance premiere as the first project to debut under their new production company, Higher Ground.

“They created Higher Ground because they believe we need stories that build bridges, not walls,” Reichert said. You can’t blame them, then, for leaving a certain wall-loving president out of it.

Watch American Factory on Netflix