Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
“Julia’s Stepping Stones,” a documentary chronicling Academy and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Julia Reichert’s influential career, has been acquired by Netflix to premiere Dec. 18.
Crafted by Steven Bognar of Yellow Springs, Reichert’s husband who shared Academy and Emmy Award honors for their documentary “American Factory,” “Julia’s Stepping Stones” is told in Reichert’s own words. Before her death in 2022 she recorded the story of how she became a filmmaker. The film premiered in April at the Full Frame Film Festival and marks the acclaimed duo’s final collaboration.
“I am so excited and grateful because Julia’s story is going to be all over the world,” Bognar said. “Her story, her voice, is going to be translated into 60 different languages. This film was a real labor of love and also an act of grieving because I was missing her. I got to hear her voice and see her face in photos and archival home movies. Working on the film was a way for me to cope with the loss.”
He has been working on the film for a year and a half, fully determined to make sure the end result was worthy of the couple’s pedigree.
“I made this film alone but Julia and I always had high standards,” Bognar said. “I’ve been crafting it to the best of my abilities without her but it really is our final collaboration. It’s her voice in the film telling her story and with her writing. She wrote it and she’s the narrator. We kind of made the film together but I’m finishing it on my own.”
A longtime Yellow Springs resident, Reichert died Dec. 1, 2022, at 76 after battling a rare form of cancer for four and a half years. For 50 years, along with longtime collaborators Steven Bognar and Jim Klein, she illuminated humanity, particularly America’s working-class, across compelling themes of feminism, family, politics and economics. She was also a Wright State University professor of film production for 28 years.
