After a struggle with urothelial cancer, Julia Reichert passed away at the age of 76. Her 50-year career as a documentarian includes an Oscar award in 2020 for American Factory.
Reichert passed away on Thursday, December 1, 2022 night in her Yellow Springs, Ohio, home while surrounded by her family, according to her frequent co-worker in the film industry Steven Bognar.
Kenneth Turan, an author for Los Angeles Times shared a Tweet in which he confirmed the news of Julia Reichert’s death.
Sad to hear about the death of Julia Reichert. She made some extraordinary documentaries, including the Oscar-winning “American Factory,” about what it means to be working class in this country. Wish there were more like her. https://t.co/kNsMJ8H5Cb
— Kenneth Turan (@KennethTuran) December 6, 2022
Here we honor the lives and legacies of the celebrities we’ve written about:
- Coconut Kitty Obituary: How Did the Instagram Model Die?
- Erin Maroney Fraser Obituary: What was the Cause of SNL Writer Death?
- Alex Canchari Obituary: How Did the Jockey Die?
An Overview of the Documentary Filmmaker’s Life
Julia Reichert underwent chemotherapy before winning the Oscar, but she nevertheless went to the ceremony and came on stage alongside Bognar to claim their prize. Later, the duo received an Emmy for American Factory.
The director, producer and writer who has long been considered the “godmother” of the independent film business was nominated for an Oscar for Union Maids, Seeing Red: Tales of American Communists and The Final Truck: Closure of a GM Factory.
Growing Up Female, her debut feature was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress because it was “culturally, historically or aesthetically important.” In the film American Factory, a Chinese entrepreneur who wants to manufacture car windshields reopens a shuttered GM plant outside of Dayton, Ohio.
The film depicts the collaboration of Chinese and American workers in the face of robotic technology installation and attempts to break unions.
After winning a directing award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the documentary—a follow-up to The Last Truck which documented the final days of a once-thriving union shop gained the support of Netflix and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production firm.
In a statement, Higher Ground remembered Reichert as a “true giant”:
“A trailblazing filmmaker, Julia Reichert dedicated her life to documenting socially and historically significant stories that gave voice to so many, particularly the working class and women”.
The statement continued:
“Collaborating with her on the Oscar-winning documentary American Factory was an honor and privilege that we will always cherish at Higher Ground. We know that Julia’s talent, humanity and commitment to mission-centric storytelling will continue to inspire current and future creators worldwide, including all of us.”
The films Reichert have aired on HBO and PBS in addition to major film festivals like Sundance, Telluride, South by Southwest, Hot Docs and others. Much presents radical humanism, American labor history and the history of the women’s movement.
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in a 2019 essay to accompany a retrospective of Reichert’s films:
“There’s a lot in Reichert’s documentaries to make you angry, as there should be given the subjects they take on, but there’s a lot of sweetness in them too”.
Julia Reichert who was born on June 16, 1946, to Louis and Dorothy Reichert in Princeton, New Jersey, graduated from Bordentown Regional High School in 1964. With limited possibilities for distributing films by and about women, Reichert and Jim Klein created New Day Films, a cooperative for the distribution of documentaries, in 1971.
When asked in a CBC radio interview in June 2019 if she wanted to be a filmmaker or make a difference in the world, Reichert said right away:
“Oh, certainly change the world…That was definitely what was on our minds. I use ‘our’ because we really felt part of a big movement right at that time — the late ’60s into the mid-’70s and beyond.”
She claimed that before people branded her as a filmmaker, she never referred to herself as one.
Much information is available regarding the obituary of Julia Reichert. We sincerely hope you enjoy our post. If you have any other information about her, please share it in the comments area below. Follow us on Twitter for the most recent news and read our most recent posts about obituaries, autopsy results, fatalities, accidents and other recent incidents.