14/03/2025 - TV director and cinematographer Uta Briesewitz kicks off her feature-film career with a Lili Reinhart-led debut about the horrors of moderating the digital realm

“It’s not the kind of stuff you want to talk about on a first date,” says 25-year-old aspiring nurse Daisy (US actress Lili Reinhart, best known for the TV series Riverdale) about her slog-like content-moderation job at the threateningly named, Tallahassee, Florida-based Paladin Control. Known for her work on US series including Jane the Virgin, Westworld, Stranger Things, Black Mirror and, most recently, Severance, German cinematographer and television director Uta Briesewitz makes the shift to feature directing with American Sweatshop [+see also:
interview: Uta Briesewitz
film profile], her debut film. With a screenplay by Matthew Nemeth, the movie about this eponymous workplace and the mystery that unfolds there has had its world premiere in the Narrative Spotlight strand of SXSW.

As content moderators – a job recently brought into the spotlight over questions of automation and artificial intelligence online – Daisy, her friend Ava (Portuguese actress Daniela Melchior) and her colleagues Bob (US actor Joel Fry) and Paul (UK thesp Jeremy Ang Jones) are forced to make split-second decisions on flagged videos based on ever-changing rules and guidelines. Pressured to reach quotas, they are fed some bizarre content marked by users, while other footage is truly graphic and horrifying. Daisy faints after watching something she believes to be a graphic torture video, which others believe is just a staged fetish clip. Her growing obsession with the video – whose gruesome visuals seep into her dreams and her everyday life – leads her to try to track down the person who made it. Is it a heroic act or just a direly misled act of vengeance?

Despite its attempts to push us to the edge of our seat, American Sweatshop is oddly tame, instead having the makings of a vengeance thriller but never fully taking the plunge. One could look to Canadian director Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, for instance, for a much more enthralling examination of obsession with dark audiovisual content gone wild. This is owing to the script, which never confronts head-on the fraught nature of digital censorship or the so-called Wild West of the virtual sphere: the fact that we really have no clear way to draw the line between so-called “appropriate” and “inappropriate”, and those in power are the ones to decide.

Instead, the screenplay bends to slightly absurd dialogue and character choices that feel half-baked: “What the fuck is wrong with you?” demands Daisy’s boss (German actress Christiane Paul), brandishing a printout of a video of a woman jumping from a 20-storey building. The screenplay also carries a sometimes tonally uncomfortable sense of dry, sardonic humour: for instance, Ava brushes off Daisy’s fainting by calling it a rite of passage at the company, and she calls a blurry beheading “not too bad”. At the same time, Daisy’s vigilante kick feels underdeveloped, offsetting a confident performance by Reinhart with character motivations that seem to come out of nowhere.

However, Briesewitz and DoP Jörg Widmer make some interesting directorial choices, including framing the crucial video as a reflection in the eyes of Daisy. This way, we can piece together the actions based on the film’s title and the slivers of visuals without the filmmaker asking the viewers to also act as content moderators themselves. Briesewitz also balances the screen-life aspect of the film with Daisy’s everyday life in a fashion that feels natural, instilling a slight sense of fear in us at what we might encounter next, whether in the film or in real life, as we scroll online.

American Sweatshop is a German production by Baltimore Pictures and Elsani & Neary Media GmbH, co-produced by Elsani Film GmbH. Its world sales are managed by Myriad Pictures.