There’s a new and terrifying rite of passage for parents: giving their kids unfettered access to the internet for the first time.
Filmmaker Uta Briesewitz faced that fear when her children turned 13 and she gave them their first smartphone. She said, “I can either give them a tool about how exciting the world is, and they’ll be curious about the world, or I’m handing them something that’s damaging them forever.”
Extreme content has existed since our ancestors could first carve obscene images into walls, but in the streaming video era it’s never been as easy to watch – willingly or unwillingly. That flood of nightmares is the unseen subject of American Sweatshop, the new dark drama from Briesewitz that gets its world premiere at South by Southwest.
In it, Lili Reinhart plays Daisy, a low-wage worker pressing buttons in a personality-less office, just a resident of one desk among many. But while the existential grind of modern corporate life is the horror on the audience’s screen, she’s watching something worse. In fact, everything worse. Murder. Abuse. Mutilation. She and her coworkers are content moderators, watching an endless barrage of appalling material to judge whether it’s fit for their viewers or not. Briesewitz said, “It’s almost like a petri dish experiment. You expose people, eight hours a day, to the most violent and horrible images and videos on the internet. These people suffer from PTSD, they suffer from depression, sleeplessness, and they often develop suicidal tendencies. That should be a wakeup call for us, if that’s down the road if we consume these images.”
Matthew Nemeth’s script was inspired by a series of articles that he was given by his girlfriend, all exploring the psychological devastation wreaked on these minimum wage workers who have become the ultimate arbiters of what is and isn’t acceptable online. When he started looking for directors, “He claims that I was his first pick, and I say I was the last one on the list,” Briesewitz said. “But it isn’t often that I get a script and call my agent and say, ‘I have to do this right away.’”
Briesewitz described herself as a visual person, and as an artist and seasoned cinematographer “images are very important to me. The whole idea about making a film about how the overconsumption of images, and what can sneak in, can really hurt us and really affect us, that was something I was really interested in.”
She herself is very selective on her online habits: her only social media presence is an Instagram account, she said, “and that’s very private – only family stuff.” The only other content she posts is motion-sensor activated footage of deer crossing her property, and that was enough for the algorithm to subject her to hideous images. “All of a sudden on Instagram I’m being fed – and even saying it I feel like I’m brutalizing you – of a deer running across the road and being hit by a car, and being hit so violently it was literally pulverized. For a split second I couldn’t even understand what I watched, I was traumatized, and it was one of those moments where I went, ‘I wish I could erase that from my mind right now.’”
That one clip kept coming back to her, and helped her identify with Daisy. “You’ll be doing something really relaxing, really different, and then that violent image pops in your mind. … Just multiply that with more images, and what it does to our minds, to our souls. It’s very scary.”
American Sweatshop
Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere
Saturday 8, 9:30pm, ZACH TheatreMonday 10, 6:15pm, Alamo South Lamar
Thursday 13, 2:15pm, Hyatt Regency
Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2025 coverage.
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.