A Yellow Springs filmmaker and Antioch College alum is being awarded one of the documentary industry’s highest honors. Julia Reichert is set to receive the International Documentary Association’s 2018 Career Achievement Award in Los Angeles next month.
Past honorees include Walter Cronkite, Ken Burns, Barbara Kopple and Bill Moyers.
Reichert’s nearly 50-year career includes an Emmy win, and three Academy Award nominations. Reichert says documentary storytelling can help educate and bring people together.
“Whether it’s auto workers losing their jobs, parents fighting for the lives of their children because they have cancer, labor, labor unions and so forth, we try to develop a deeper understanding, empathy and compassion," she says, "and I think there is less and less of that in the public discourse these days and even in, perhaps, our lives.”
Reichert’s films, co-directed with Jim Klein, and later with Steven Bognar, include 2010’s The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, documenting the final days at General Motors’ Moraine Assembly plant, now home to Fuyao Glass America's factory.
Reichert also previously worked at WYSO and was a longtime professor at Wright State University.
Her first film, Growing Up Female, from 1971, began as a senior project at Antioch College. In 2011, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry.
