American Factory, which takes a look at what happens when a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in Ohio, was acquired by the Obamas after the documentary won a jury prize for its directing at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2008 post-industrial Ohio, the General Motors plant shut down, leaving thousands of Ohioans out of work. Years later, Chairman Cao Dewang, CEO of the Chinese company Fuyao Glass, opened an American wing of his sprawling, multi-billion-dollar company in the husk of the abandoned General Motors plant, hiring thousands of locals and kicking off one of the strangest tales of international labour and cross-cultural contact committed to screen. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s American Factory is a wry look at what happens when America’s economic vulnerability comes toe-to-toe with a new era of ambitious Chinese expansion. It’s a tale threaded through with cinema verite scenes of union meetings and management discussions, and on and on, until what emerges is a difficult, often funny, but altogether urgent look at the future of labour. An unsettling question hangs over the company and the story: will America’s Fuyao Glass employees succeed in unionising?

How and why, and whether the upper management is able to do anything to stop it, serve as the backbone for American Factory. An everyday political drama that has implications, not only for these workers’ lives, but for how we come to understand the broader disconnects between labourer and boss, and by extension, America and China.

Netflix: The Obamas just opened up about their powerful Netflix documentary, American Factory