Her first film was the noted documentary Growing Up Female, which she created with her longtime collaborator James Klein. In 1971, she helped to found New Days Films, a US film distribution company created to help bolster the Women's Movement. New Day Films avoids traditional distribution to theaters and instead distributes films directly to schools, unions, and community groups. She received her first Academy Award nomination in 1978 with Klein and Miles Mogulescu for Union Maids. She was also nominated, again with Klein, in 1984 for the Oscar for the best documentary for Seeing Red. Julia and Steve Bognar worked on the editing and structuring of their documentary, "A Lion in the House", which follows five families each of whom has a child who has been diagnosed with cancer. The filmmakers began this documentary in 1997, and continue shooting and editing to this date. They intend and hope the project will air on PBS, whose branch, "The Independent Television Service" has supported the film thus far. While at MacDowell, Julia and Steve learned they had been awarded a $50,000 grant for the project from the National Endowment for the Arts. Reichert and Bognar both received The MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2004. The 2006 documentary A Lion in the House, co-directed with Steven Bognar, received multiple award nominations, including the 2006 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Documentary Award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. Riechert won an Emmy for Outstanding Merits in Non-Fiction Movies at the 2007 Primetime Emmy Awards. Reichert was again nominated for an Academy Award with Steven Bognar in 2010 for Best Short Documentary for the film . In 2019, Reichert and Bognar premiered their documentary American Factory at the Sundance Film Festival where they won the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary. The film has been picked up by Netflix. In January 2020, Bognar and Reichert won the Directors Guild of America Award for Documentary for American Factory. On Feb 9, 2020, American Factory won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. During her acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, Reichert appeared to quote a rallying cry from The Communist Manifesto, saying “working people have it harder and harder these days and we believe that things will get better when workers of the world unite.”
Style
In many of her films, Reichert focuses on various social issues, like gender and working-class issues. A number of her films are also tailored to a specific audience and propose potential solutions to the social problems to which they call attention. However, she tends to avoid singling out any single person in her documentaries as a heroic figure, which works against her goal to get audiences to take action. Reichert uses a direct cinema style, avoiding voiceover narration. By mostly presenting interviews in her documentaries, she avoids framing the issues, preferring to allow the subjects to have more control over the narrative.
