Julia Bell Reichert (June 16, 1946 – December 1, 2022) was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist.
[4] The family spent summers on Long Beach Island, NJ, where her father ran a fishing charter business.
In 1968, Reichert became partners in life and creative work with Jim Klein, who introduced her in 1969 to the Antioch student radio station, WYSO FM.
Reichert began to learn audio recording, tape editing, interviewing, and storytelling within a time frame.
She trained and directed about ten students and several outsiders in the writing, compiling, taping, interviewing, and announcing involved."
In 1969, Reichert created and hosted "The Single Girl" on WYSO, possibly the first openly feminist radio program in the United States.
[7] Produced in 1970 and released in 1971, Growing Up Female chronicles the socialization of women at six different ages, blending interview and cinema verité material.
Reichert and Klein's collaboration continued with Methadone – An American Way of Dealing, released in 1974, and then turned towards history, teaming up with Miles Mogulescu to make Union Maids.
Inspired by the book "Rank & File – Personal Histories By Working Class Organizers" by Alice & Staughton Lynd, the film is a pioneering oral history/archival documentary telling the rank-and-file story of three union activists.
Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists, produced & directed by Reichert & Klein in the late 1970s and early 1980s, premiered at the Telluride and New York Film Festivals in 1983.
Edited from over 525 hours of material filmed across six years and produced in partnership with ITVS, A Lion in the House tells the stories of five children and teenagers, their parents, siblings, and caregivers as they struggle to navigate childhood cancer and all its challenges.
In 2012, Julia Reichert returned to her roots, beginning a two-year collaboration with WYSO 91.3 FM, where she learned many aspects of nonfiction storytelling in the 1960s and 70s.
The stories came in the form of WYSO radio pieces, short films, a photography exhibit, and an interactive transmedia website.
In 2015, Reichert and Bognar collaborated with the Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music to create the documentary short Making Morning Star, a behind-the-scenes look at the workshopping and development of a new American opera by composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist William M. Hoffman.
In 2015, it was announced that the former General Motors plant in Moraine would be occupied by Chinese windshield manufacturer Fuyao, injecting a wave of new jobs back into the community.
The film became a production of Participant Media in late 2016, and Diane Weyermann and Jeff Skoll became Executive Producers.
Following a full Summer of performances, which included special guests such as Jon Stewart, Tiffany Haddish, and Chris Rock, Bognar and Reichert produced and directed two films - 8:46, which premiered online via Netflix in 2020, and Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life, which closed the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival to a sold-out audience of over 6,000 at Radio City Music Hall.
Her five feature documentaries about labor struggles, Union Maids, Seeing Red, The Last Truck, American Factory and 9to5 - The Story of a Movement, center on collective actions, with particular attention to nuances of class, race, and gender.
Reichert, with collaborators Klein and Bognar, avoids singling out one "heroic individual" in her films, believing as she does that it takes collective action and solidarity to make social change.
Located in the Dayton View neighborhood, the home served as a hub for social issue media creation, including the community documentary series "Summer Lights."
Reichert taught film for 28 years in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Motion Pictures at Wright State University, in Dayton Ohio.
Her former students include Hannah Beachler, Karri O'Reilly, Nicole Reigel, Sherman Payne, and Erik Bork.