Julia Reichert was the voice of the working class

Anyone who looks at the titles and subjects that the American independent documentary maker Julia Reichert has directed in her fifty-year career can only conclude one thing. She was both a child of her time and ahead of her time. Her films are more relevant than ever because of their social eye.

Her debut film Growing Up Female (together with her then-partner Jim Klein) from 1971 shows the effect of media and advertising stereotypes on the lives of young American women. Growing Up Female is widely regarded as the first film to emerge from the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, and should be on every young film student’s watch list.

That goes for all of Reichert’s work, who devoted her life to giving a voice to women and the working class. Trained in radio, she was a master at using oral history and interviews in her work. The director of some of the most socially engaged documentaries of the past half century passed away last week at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio from cancer. Her most personal movie was probably A Lion In The House about childhood cancer, inspired in part by her own daughter’s battle with Hodgkin’s disease.

Pandemic show

Her last production (with her second husband Steven Bognar) was David Chappelle’s pandemic show Live in Real Life in 2020. But she became more known to a new generation through the Academy Award-winning Netflix documentary American Factory (2019), a film supported by Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company about a Chinese tech entrepreneur who reopens an American car factory in Ohio. The result is a major culture clash between old-fashioned American working class mores and new world discipline. She previously filmed there how a General Motors car factory had to close its doors in the Oscar-nominated area The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2003). There were also Oscar nominations for it Union Maids (1976), on female trade unionists during the economic crisis of the 1930s and 1930s Seeing red (1983), about the communist party and the US in the early twentieth century. Her political views were also reflected in the way she made films: it was not her as a director that was central, but the subject, and the contributions of each crew member to a collective process.

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