10/03/2025 - We talked to the German filmmaker about her latest film, which looks at the effects of social media on its consumers

US-based German director and cinematographer Uta Briesewitz presented her new feature film American Sweatshop [+see also:
film review
interview: Uta Briesewitz
film profile] at this year's SXSW Film Festival. Her psychological thriller deals with the abysses of social media and was written by author Matthew Nemeth. We spoke to her about her approach to the story and to representing violence.

Cineuropa: What fascinated you about the idea of the film?
Uta Briesewitz: I'm not that present on social media myself. I have an Instagram account that is only for my closest friends. But I know that videos and everything posted on these social platforms can be flagged or reported. And I also know that someone has to look at it. I didn't know exactly what that would look like technically. When I read the script for the first time, it was a whole new, interesting world for me. I started doing research, reading articles and watching the German documentary The Cleaners. These places the film describes can almost be seen as a case study. You play the worst that the internet has to offer to a group of people, young people, for eight to ten hours a day. And then you see what the effects are on the psyche. People usually become depressed, suffer from insomnia, show symptoms of PTSD, some become violent, antisocial and in some cases develop suicidal tendencies. I was very interested in portraying this. I wanted to make a movie that could be a conversation starter. 

How did you develop the different characters?
We were inspired by true stories from the various articles we read. For example, the character of Paul specifically watches a video in which a dog is being tortured and possibly killed. He leaves his workplace in a rush to get home and hug his dog who waits for him in his apartment. The alligator also featured in a story. For me, it's a symbol that you can see the danger, but somehow it's completely natural and it's ignored. 

One particular video became the core of the film. In it, a woman is subjected to brutal sexual violence. How did you deal with this?
It's important to me how sexual violence against women is portrayed. You can do it in a way that serves the topic, but you can also do it in a way that makes it look like advertising. In this film, which has a very dark theme, we didn't want to send people to the cinema and then see them come out of it traumatised. That's why we leave a lot to the viewer's imagination and we only give hints as to where things are going. But it was particularly important to me when we shot the video with this girl, who is so terribly brutalised, that I didn't have any images that sexualise it unnecessarily. That means, for example, that I didn't need a bare breast or a close-up of her underwear. I deliberately didn't want to sexualise this moment of violence, even though it is sexual violence in the end. Even though we only hint at the sexual violence that will take place, some women in our team had to turn away from the scene while shooting it even though our actress, who did it so courageously, was practically lying there fully clothed. 

Where did you shoot? 
We shot in Germany, so we were limited in terms of what we could really show. Thanks to the North Rhine-Westphalia Film Fund, which gave us a lot of support and made the film possible - alongside our German producer Anita Elsani – we were restricted to shooting in Germany. Our exteriors were very limited and therefore we felt we could achieve the illusion of actually being in the US while shooting in Germany. You are very much in people's heads. The search for the world is directed at the monitor. The world is big the moment you go online and see the lives of others. By simply watching, your own world actually becomes smaller and smaller and more oppressive.

One of the movie's great strengths is its unusual ending. Was it difficult to decide on an ending? 
The Daisy story describes frustration and anger. What can you do if you want to do something about it? What I liked about the story was that our lead character Daisy did not take the route of vengeance that we so often see portrayed. “Get a gun and let’s take it from there.” I've never touched a gun in my life, Daisy either. That's why we used the parallel of her hammering the nails into the steak. She wants to understand why people do certain things. She doesn't know how far she'll go. Matthew Nemeth, who wrote the original script and with whom we developed it further, had already planned this abrupt ending. I found it very elegant and very thought-provoking. I liked that very much.