With a career that lasted over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries, Julia Reichert passed away at age 76, according to a report from Variety.
Reichert was born June 6, 1946, in Bordentown Township, New Jersey. As a child, she had a fascination with photography. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in Antioch College in 1964. But she dropped out three years later to hitchhike her way across the United States to California. A year later, she returned to Antioch and graduated in 1970 with a degree in documentary arts.
Julia Reichert's Career
When Julia Reichert was still in college, she was introduced to Jim Klein, who became her partner when he introduced her to the radio station. At the radio station, she learned about editing, storytelling, and more in a certain time frame. For her course evaluation, her manager had stated, "Julia developed practically on her own initiative the WYSO news program. She trained and directed about ten students and several outsiders in the writing, compiling, taping, interviewing, and announcing involved."
In 1969, she had created possibly the first openly feminist radio program in the United States called The Single Girl. After that, however, she would retitle the show to Sisters, Brothers, Lovers, Listen.
It wouldn't be until the early 1970s that her first work, called Growing Up Female, was released, following a woman's social life at different stages. It was the first feature documentary of the Women's Liberation Movement. This feature would be added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2011. At the same time, she helped co-found New Day Films that served non-theatrical markets such as colleges, libraries, and community groups.
As time went on, she would become a 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 American Factory (2020). The latter landed the filmmaker an Oscar. American Factory was about an old GM plant that would give jobs back to the community thanks to a Chinese manufacturer.
The Hollywood Reporter captured a statement from frequent collaborator Steven Bognar. He discussed their work on American Factory, which reads as follows:
"We weren’t flying in once every month or two. We went there all the time and shot 1,200 hours of material. We became deeply familiar with the plant to the point where we could walk in, with ID badges that allowed us through any door. It was kind of like showing up for work, not that we were making windshields, but we were doing our job side by side with everyone else. By year two or three, we had been there longer than a lot of people who actually worked there.”
Reichert was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2006 and later developed urothelial cancer in 2018. She passed from the latter at her home in Ohio at the age of 76. She is survived by her daughter and her husband.