Steven Bognar

Near the middle of American Factory (2019) an American morning meeting, people shuffling in with coffee, is set against a Chinese one, where workers stand in rows and shout a slogan back at their supervisor. Nobody narrates it. There are almost no captions. Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert put the two rooms side by side and let us look, and that is his method in a sentence: get in, stay, and do not tell the audience what it has just seen.

He has been working this way since the 1990s, with early films such as Personal Belongings (1996) and Picture Day (2000), and for most of that time with Reichert, his co-director on eight films. Together they made A Lion in the House (2006), a series that followed families through childhood cancer over several years, and The Last Truck (2009), a short about the day the General Motors plant at Moraine, Ohio, built its final vehicle. When a Chinese company called Fuyao bought that same empty building to make car glass, they went back and stayed. Later came 9to5: The Story of a Movement (2020), on the working women's movement of the 1970s. The subjects are labour and working-class life in the American Midwest, and Bognar has said of the approach: "We try never to make ‘an issue film.’ We try to tell stories about people."

The fairness is the achievement. American Factory gives Wong He, a furnace engineer a long way from his family, the same attention as Rob Haerr, the American supervisor who takes the Chinese crew to Thanksgiving and then to fire guns in his garden; both men are puzzled to find they like each other. Fuyao let the cameras into everything, including a training session where the locals are described as slow, with fat fingers, and Bognar does not lean on the moment. When American managers are flown to China for the company New Year party and workers in matching costumes sing about the firm, one visitor weeps in the front row and, to our surprise, so did we. The singing is sincere, the people are exhausted, and the camera holds on their faces and leaves the judgement to us.

The same habit has a cost. Because he will not argue, the wider politics of the plant are left for the viewer to supply, and some critics have wanted more of a fight from him. Our own complaint was smaller: the film has more people than 110 minutes can hold, and Chad Cannon's score keeps telling them it will be all right when the picture has just shown that it will not. Lindsay Utz's editing does the real arguing, in what she puts next to what.

Reichert died in 2022, and Bognar's work since has mostly been as an executive producer, on projects such as Who Moves America (2026). What he does alone, at length, we do not yet know. Start with American Factory, then The Last Truck: the short is the feature's first chapter, and it reads better once you know how the building was filled again.