In American Sweatshop, German director Uta Briesewitz’s new psychological drama, every character working at a content moderation firm understands that ingesting horrific images is part of the job. They have all seen the disturbing footage uploaded to social media, and they know how important it is that someone is always there to determine whether those things should be taken down. But as important as their work is, the content moderators can also feel how their jobs have the potential to cultivate a dark psychological rot within themselves.
When I spoke with Briesewitz recently ahead of American Sweatshop’s digital release, she told me that she was largely unfamiliar with the world of content moderation before receiving an early draft of the film’s script in 2019. At the time, Briesewitz and her husband were debating whether to give their teenage children their first smartphones — a choice they didn’t want to make lightly. And the film’s exploration of the largely invisible work that goes into keeping the internet humming spoke to some of Briesewitz’s fears.
“Of course they each got a phone because that’s how kids stay in touch and it’s part of their social world,” Briesewitz recounted. “But the moment I handed the phones to them, I couldn’t help but think: Am I giving them a tool that will connect them with the world? Or am I giving them a way to become hurt or damaged in the privacy of our home?”
American Sweatshop revolves around Daisy Moriarty (Lili Reinhart), a seasoned moderator whose life starts to unravel after she screens a video at work that very much seems to feature the sexualized murder of a screaming woman. At this point in her career, Daisy’s seen countless hours of footage depicting things that could easily be mistaken for an actual snuff film. Daisy’s boss, Joy (Christiane Paul), and her colleague Ava (Daniela Melchior) are confident that this latest ticket is just another explicit video that technically isn’t violating any guidelines. But Daisy can’t shake the feeling that what she has seen is real, and that everyone around her is refusing to do anything about a woman’s death being shared as entertainment.
When Briesewitz — a cinematographer-turned-director whose previous work includes The Wire, United States of Tara, and True Blood — first came on to American Sweatshop, the project was being developed as a series. The concepts at the center of writer Matthew Nemeth’s early scripts resonated with Briesewitz, but she felt that American Sweatshop’s larger ideas might not play well episodically. This led to the project being retooled as a feature, and Briesewitz looking to Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s 2018 documentary The Cleaners for inspiration. Briesewitz told me that watching the doc gave her a much clearer understanding of how American Sweatshop could dig into the suffering that comes with working in this kind of job.
“These content moderation places can all almost be seen as a lab experiment where you put a bunch of people in a room, feed them the worst the internet has to offer, and watch to see what it does to them,” Briesewitz said. “Some fall into a depression, others develop PTSD, and some sometimes develop suicidal tendencies. The outlook is not very good.”
Even though American Sweatshop’s story is kicked into motion by horrific footage, Briesewitz felt it was important that audiences never clearly see what Daisy has witnessed. The images themselves are not what the movie is about. Rather, Briesewitz wanted to leave people thinking about “how the cruelty of that disturbing content affects people,” which is why the movie features so many close-ups of Daisy’s eyes as she repeatedly watches the video.
“Of course we had to show some of what Daisy is watching, and so we see some of the footage in the reflections on her eyes,” Briesewitz explained. “When you’re seeing something through a reflection, it’s an image once removed that, hopefully, affects you a little bit less. But it also piques your curiosity because you have to lean a little bit closer to make out what you’re actually watching, and I wanted to evoke the idea of an image burning itself into her mind.”
Image: Brainstorm Media
When I asked Briesewitz whether she sees American Sweatshop as a thriller, a drama, or even a kind of horror, she said that, while it’s a little bit of everything, she balks at categorizing it as a thriller because of how that genre tends to inform audiences’ expectations. She doesn’t want people coming into the movie assuming that tension will increasingly build until things go left because at its core, American Sweatshop is a rumination on how this line of work can warp a person’s sense of reality and themselves.
“The way the film subverts certain expectations is meant to reflect how unpredictable Daisy is and how, throughout the story, we never really quite know what she is capable of,” Briesewitz told me. “She doesn’t know what she is capable of and she doesn’t know how much she has been affected by everything that she’s seen.”
What Briesewitz does want is for viewers to come away understanding that, as unbelievably grim and bleak as American Sweatshop is, its subject matter is a very real part of how we are all able to exist on the internet without (always) being bombarded with things that leave us traumatized. It’s easy to assume that this kind of moderation can be handled by machines, but in reality, it’s people that make it all work.
“At one point in the film, Daisy spells something out very clearly: this is the one job that AI can’t do because it needs human suffering,” Briesewitz told me. “AI can’t feel empathy or suffer like the human mind can. And I think if you make people aware of the suffering that is required for people to do this job, the conversation becomes very uncomfortable.”
American Sweatshop hits theaters and will be available to purchase digitally on September 19th.
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