Yellow Springs filmmakers soak up their Sundance Film Festival experience

Credit: FilmDayton

Credit: FilmDayton

A group of Dayton filmmakers are all smiles in Utah today.

FilmDayton posted an update on Yellow Springs directors, Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, as they enjoy the Sundance Film Festival that began on Thursday. Their film, "American Factory" is part of the Sundance Film Festival's 2019 documentary competition lineup.

Billed as the largest independent film festival in the United States, the Sundance is shown annually in Park City, Utah. The 2019 event runs from January 24 through February 3.

“American Factory” will follow “a Chinese billionaire (who) opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America,” according to a description of the work in Variety magazine.

Bognar and Reichert were also the the makers of the successful HBO documentary “The Last Truck”. The pair has worked for several years on a new film about Fuyao Glass America — the company that revitalized the General Motors plant whose final days “The Last Truck” painstakingly explored. The Last Truck, released in 2009, was nominated for the Academy Award for “Best Documentary (short subject)” that year. (Another work, Music by Prudence, was the winner in the 2010 Academy Awards.)

Reichert, who is a three-time Oscar nominee, will be awarded the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award for 2018 in Los Angeles next month.

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