Daisy (Lili Reinhart) works as a content cleaner: her job is to watch and delete problematic videos online. Constantly being confronted with the dark side of the internet is making the 25-year-old increasingly numb. Until she comes across a particularly disturbing video that she can’t get out of her head. Daisy decides to hold the makers of the video to account, but neither her boss nor the police take her seriously. So she sets out on her own to track down the perpetrators, only to find herself increasingly in the crosshairs. 

In her feature film debut, Uta Briesewitz uses powerful, precise imagery to highlight the psychological exploitation of this new class of digital workers, who have not yet been replaced by AI simply because it is incapable of feeling emotional pain (“They’re paying us for our pain”). Repeatedly featuring striking visual ideas, “American Sweatshop” not only vehemently addresses these completely unacceptable working conditions, but also the effects of excessive social media consumption, partly caused by unregulated Big Tech algorithms. In the way it combines gripping suspense with questions about the ethical issues surrounding the production and reception of (digital) moving images, “American Sweatshop” follows in the tradition of media-reflective thriller cinema such as “Blow Up” (1966) or “8mm” (1999). (Matthias Hagel, CINEMATE)