SXSW 2025 Review: “American Sweatshop” – A Workplace Nightmare!
The evolution of social media has brought us into a new universe of instant content sent right to our phones and devices. Where Facebook and Twitter ruled the social media world with thoughts and posts at our disposal, a more visual side of the internet has spawned in the last decade and a half. With Instagram’s focus on images (and now reels), followed by the biggest social media takeover in 2020 with TikTok, video content that is tailored to its audience has become the prime subject of scrolling. We have gone from seeking out content to content being sent right to us, sometimes crossing the line between what we would like to see and what we would rather not.
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American Sweatshop, starring Lili Reinhart as Daisy, Daniela Melchior, and Joel Fry, exposes one of the most emotionally taxing jobs, a social media content moderator. Workers are sent videos that have been flagged by users and must determine whether they go against application regulation or not. Featuring some of the most vile and upsetting videos one could imagine being sent to these workers, Uta Briesewitz has developed a film shining a light on the “heroes” of the social media and how sometimes a job can have crippling effects beyond the desk.
Briesewitz highlights just how emotionally draining content moderation can be, opening up the film with Joel Fry’s character screaming and pounding his desk to cope with the images he has just witnessed. As a result, she never subjects her audience to the videos her characters are watching in full. She offers glimpses of settings and titles of the videos to give her audience enough to break them without traumatizing them.
📸 Lili Reinhart and Olivia Giacobetti at the “American Sweatshop” Premiere during SXSW. pic.twitter.com/1kHJvtZQ79
— Lili Reinhart Online (@FRLiliReinhart) March 9, 2025
Just by giving titles of videos, the audience’s minds wander to extremely dark places, many times even worse than what a video could portray. This puts the audience in just the right place to understand Daisy and her coworkers’ conflicting emotions with the work they do. When Daisy believes one of the videos she is sent is a real video rather than homemade, she attempts to track down the man in the video. Even though some of the decisions Daisy makes borders on and even crosses the moral line, one does not have to agree with a character’s action necessarily to understand how pain can cause them to act uncharacteristically. Daisy as a flawed character gives the film its ability to discover the gray areas between justice and violence.
Even with Briesewitz’s balance between showing and telling, American Sweatshop depresses its audience to mirror the characters enduring such a difficult job. However, it is hard for the film to demand any sort of rewatch years down the road. There is much discussion to be had by the end of the film regarding its themes, but it is more because of what is presented rather than Briesewitz taking any stance to accompany her film It seems like the ideas are placed more in the audience’s hands to grapple with and her ability to paint a full picture of the landscape she has created through her characters and the film’s modernity is limited. The film functions as both a workplace drama and a character study but the clear break between the two cuts into its fluidity as a story.
Lili Reinhart at “American Sweatshop” SXSW Premiere pic.twitter.com/V8bIZdeDsM
— More Culture Less Pop (@culturelesspop) March 12, 2025
Where the film lands decently is in its psychological exploration of our generation being chronically online and the internet’s capability to break us. As the film moves forward, it is impossible not to think about our own social media experiences, that because of these workers, are more filtered, if one can believe it. The reality that there are people behind the cameras of some of these disgusting and upsetting videos is an entire story in itself.
American Sweatshop shows the darkest places on the internet and how they are being shielded from our eyes, but at the expense of those working to make it a safer place. As a result, the audience can find relatability in the work world and how many only see the effects of our work rather than the journey through it. This film is a mixed bag at times between its subject and cat and mouse subplot but poses enough interesting ideas to make it a worthwhile one to watch.
‘American Sweatshop’ Rating – 3/5
Follow Steph (the Author) on IG – @cinemasteph_7
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