American Factory: Un milliardaire chinois en Ohio

Just saw this at Traverse City Film Festival. Does not sugarcoat the rust belt problem. The Chinese came to the US hoping to recharge a shuttered GM factory to build glass for autos and trucks. In return for hiring chronically unemployed in the Dayton area, they hoped that workers would participate despite low wages and unsafe working conditions given the lack of other job opportunities. The culture clash was nontrivial. Bottom line: all manufacturing jobs are threatened by automation, not just those currently held by Americans. Some cultures are willing to accept the pressure to produce, while others resist.

I am a high school history teacher in the USA. I tried showing this movie to my classes, in between lessons on industrialization and the future of automation. This helped reveal the real problems we have, in my opinion. That most of my students were uninterested, and even did not care about these future issues. All they wanted to do was play games on their phones. I told them they would be quizzed on the material to try and get them to pay attention, but they did not care. Even when writing a quick summary of the movie, most just copied and pasted their responses, one of them even used one of these comments as their source data. They watched the movie with the strong belief that they won't end up like that. That somehow, they will be immune to these future issues.

For students who do not care about their education or their future, the best teacher in the world won't help. Apathy will destroy us far quicker than anything else.

To be honest I can't believe they released this film... There are more than a few aspects that seem quite surreal and unbelievable.

I think for the most of the film you will be asking yourself a question where is all of this going, the answer is out there and it is quite broad.

One of the most shocking moments is the reveal of Chinese work culture. Workers are literally robots, they have numbers, they don't waste any time, they work 16 hours a day 26 days a month non stop.

In China, the corporation you work for is glorified to the point that you start to feel like you are part of a cult rather than a company that is simply making profit.

While it might be normal for China that there are small kids dancing, weddings happening and corporate bosses praised during one of the company celebrations, personally to me this looked surreal to the point of crazy.

For me the job is just a job, it's there because you need to make money, everything else is big bosses making big bucks off your back, nothing less nothing more, for chinese it's a cult.

Now I don't know if the goal of the globalization is to make everyone work like in China, but if it is, then everyone, literally everyone is in deep trouble, especially the biosphere of our planet ...

This film is an extraordinary achievement. With footage going back over the years, the directors have pieced together the saga of the establishment of a Chinese-run industrial operation in Dayton on the site of a much-lamented closed GM plant, illustrating, with total objectivity, the contradictions that ensue from the imposition of one national worldview upon another in a dynamic that it never a clash of equals. The impatience and contempt of the Chinese investors toward their U.S. workforce and the consequent cultural conflicts are highlighted to devastating effect, illustrated by what American viewers will find to be an uncomfortable dissection of their own culture, in all its fatuous self-indulgence, by amazing footage of lectures on the subject by Chinese cross-cultural consultants as they lecture Chinese workers and supervisors sent to Dayton to show Americans in how things should be done.

At the Q&A at the premiere at IFC Center, co-director Julia Reichert was at pains to stress that the film was never meant to be polemical, that this was an effort to immerse and learn. While some of the silllier aspects of both cultures, (but especially the regimented and self-congratulatory aspects of the Chinese). come through with particular acuity, you can't help buy muse on how Americans have acted with equal tin-earedness and cultural arrogance around the world, over many more decades than the Chinese have been at this game.

At the same time, America's neediness of manufacturing jobs, even if they don't pay a living wage, and the ways that so many of what we would normally consider our core values go out the window to accommodate anyone who will invest in them, come through particularly clearly. This all comes together in a fight over the establishment of a union that would protect workers' rights and uphold our eroding safety and environmental standards that is the vivid core of the movie.

A final note: This film has an extraordinarily compelling musical score by someone names Chad Cannon that propels and highlights the narrative and is amazingly effective on its own terms. Although the idiom is different, Cannon's score does for this film much of what Philip Glass's have done over the years for the films of Errol Morris, and that is high praise indeed.

I never thought a documentary on an American manufacturing plant would be so interesting. I'm a Canadian and I still consider this a must-watch. Extremely interesting insight into the world of manufacturing in small-town USA as well as the cultural differences between the USA and China. The whole trip to the China factory seems surreal. Unfortunately this film's ratings might get turfed by certain political interests that would rather have this stuff swept under the rug.