Robert Reich documentary opens, with Berkeley screenings this month

"The Work in Progress," the documentary directed by Ian Cheney and executive produced by Robert Reich, is released today, Sept. 4, and the first Berkeley showing is Sept. 15 at Rialto Cinemas Elmwood.

That screening is followed by a question-and-answer session with producers Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse, a UC Berkeley graduate, and Elliot Kirschner. The film then runs at the Elmwood from Sept. 18 through Sept. 24.

The bigger local date is Oct. 14, when UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall hosts a special screening with a discussion featuring Reich. The university said 500 tickets will be available to students at $5, with 1,400 general-audience tickets at $15.

Nationally, the film is scheduled at close to three dozen theaters, several of them in California and the Bay Area.

The premise is plain. More than 100 Americans, mostly strangers to one another, sit down and work through questions printed on cards. One early sequence sets two men in their 30s beneath a canopy in wintry Iowa; one reads the card aloud: how did you learn, in your early life, what America is. The answers run through immigration, a Mennonite upbringing, service and pacifism, and after a few minutes the two find common ground.

Reich's idea was not to stage liberals against conservatives, but to pair younger and older Americans, many of them in the middle of the country. The filmmakers shot in six states in the first half of 2026 - Iowa, Arizona, Illinois, Maine, Alabama and Hawaii - with a brief stop in California, and deliberately skipped the familiar political flashpoints.

"One of the most important things that we've lost," Reich says on camera, "is examples of people who have very different backgrounds and ideologies and values talking to each other in a friendly way."

He adds: "We shouldn't try to agree - that's not what we do. ... But we should agree to a process for sorting out our disagreements."

The participants include farmers and truck drivers, teachers and scholars, artists, military veterans, a conservationist, a rancher, Jewish and Christian clergy, and men incarcerated on drug charges.

Reich is a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. He was U.S. labor secretary from 1993 to 1997 under President Bill Clinton, joined the Berkeley faculty in 2006, and retired three years ago; that retirement was the subject of the 2025 documentary "The Last Class."

Ticket details for the Elmwood showings are listed by the theater. Zellerbach tickets are handled through the campus.