At Saturday’s Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony Julia Reichert mentioned “income inequality” during her best documentary acceptance speech for American Factory. The first film released by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, American Factory is about a Chinese capitalist who reopens a closed plant in Ohio, employing thousands of American workers.

During the press conference in the Spirit Awards’ media tent at Santa Monica beach I asked Reichert, who’d previously been Oscar-nominated for the 1976 and 1983 documentaries Union Maids and Seeing Red: “Do you think socialism is the answer to income inequality?” Reichert asked how many people had viewed Seeing Red, which was about Communist Party USA members, and laughed as I appeared to be the only member of the media there to have seen it.

Reichert, who was standing next to her American Factory co-director Steven Bognar, went on to tell me that: “I go back a long way. I was before Bernie Sanders. I go back to the sixties — I’m old. Do I think socialism is the answer for our country? We should all . . . share the wealth. We should tax rich people more than they are. Health care should be for all. It’s more like what I would call ‘democratic socialism feminism.’ And that’s what I’ve always been about. And nobody ever asks me that anymore,” she mused.