Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar to receive 2019 Tribute at Full Frame doc festival

Reichert and Bognar just won the directing award for US Documentary at Sundance

Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert accept the Directing Award for US Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, recognizing their work on "American Factory." Park City, Utah, Saturday, February 2, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

Fresh from a big win at the Sundance Film Festival, the directing duo of Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert are about to add another award to their distinguished careers.

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina has announced it will present the filmmakers with the festival's 2019 Tribute honor. As part of the tribute, the festival will screen a "curated selection from their significant body of work." 

It’s the gathering of our tribe, under warm skies and wafting barbecue scents.

--Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

“To put it simply, they are family," Full Frame Artistic Director Sadie Tillery said of Bognar and Reichert. "Over the years, they’ve joined us as filmmakers, curators, jurors, teachers, and two of the most engaged audience members I’ve ever met. It means so much to us to highlight their remarkable filmmaking and their impact on the documentary community.”

Reichert is a three-time Oscar nominee for Union Maids (1978), Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983) and the 2010 short documentary The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant--the latter film co-directed with Bognar.

Bognar and Reichert's 2006 film, A Lion in the House, won the Emmy for Outstanding Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking.

“We’ve been coming to Full Frame for 18 years, and love the festival, the people, and the community dearly,” Bognar and Reichert said in a statement. “It’s the gathering of our tribe, under warm skies and wafting barbecue scents. We come to Full Frame for deep immersion into cinema, for recovery after long, hard work, for restoration of our faith in the documentary practice."

Julia Reichert at a Sundance screening of the documentary "American Factory," co-directed by Steve Bognar (center, wearing hat). Park City, Utah, Thursday, January 31, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

Bognar and Reichert's latest film, American Factory, won the US Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. In a sense it's a sequel to The Last Truck, because it was shot in the same plant in Moraine, Ohio that GM used to operate. The new feature documentary focuses on what happened when a Chinese auto glass giant took over the space for a new factory, testing the capacity of Chinese ownership and American workers to succeed under one roof.

A still image from "American Factory," directed by Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert. Courtesy Sundance Film Festival