THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Julia Bell Reichert
June 16, 1946 – December 1, 2022
“I thought of film as a tool for social change….We wanted to help the women’s movement grow.”
Documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. Spent more than 40 years giving voice to women, children, the working class and the heartland in her acclaimed films. Four-time Academy Award-nominated director, for Union Maids (1977), Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1984), The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2010) and the Oscar-winning American Factory (2020). These films were her form of activism, a way to build and serve her various communities and push for change. Influenced by communal, anti-capitalist ideals of the 1960s, she co-founded a model for self-distribution of educational documentaries that became New Day Films.
Photo. “American Factory” directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert with Michelle and Barack Obama (Photo credit, Netflix).
More About Julia:
- New York Times obituary, December 2, 2022
- Filmmaker Julia Reichert reflects on her career as a retrospective of her work comes to The Neon, by Neenah Ellis, November 17, 2021, WYSO.org
- 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement, Directed by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, PBS.org
- A Conversation with Julia Reichert: A Lifetime in Labor Education and Filmmaking, June 14, 2020
- Interview with Marc Malkin, March 13, 2020
- Interview with Carrie Lozano, September 4, 2018
- Wikipedia page
- Cited in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, page 379