Julia Bell Reichert (1946-2022) was the Oscar-winning co-director of American Factory and a longtime fixture of American documentary since the 1970s. Reichert, whose first film came out in 1972, brought progressive politics, women’s rights, and working-class issues to the forefront of non-fiction cinema.
She is considered a trailblazer and was a passionate advocate for the documentary community, exploring the intersection of class, gender, and race in America. The subjects of her work ranged from activist women to autoworkers as explored in numerous Oscar-nominated films. Born in New Jersey to a working-class family, she started as a social activist. Her first film, Growing Up Female, was one of the first documentaries chronicling the modern women’s movement. Frustrated with the lack of distribution options for films by and about women, Reichert and her partner Jim Klein co-founded New Day Films, a distribution cooperative.
For 28 years, she was also a professor at Wright State University, and was one of the founding members of the Indie Caucus, an action group that worked to keep independent documentaries on PBS. Her Emmy-winning, four-hour verité epic A Lion in the House (worked on at MacDowell with collaborator Steven Bognar) followed five Cincinnati-area families and their caregivers, all grappling with childhood cancer. It took eight years to complete the film, and just as it was about to premiere at Sundance in 2006, Reichert learned she had a late-stage lymphoma. After successful rounds of chemotherapy, she was eventually cancer free. In 2018, she was diagnosed with urothelial cancer and was in and out of treatments since then—taking a break to accept the 2020 Academy Award for American Factory.
