Two Documentaries by Barbara Kopple

Urgent, eye-opening dispatches from the front lines of American class struggle, these galvanizing documentaries by Barbara Kopple—both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary—are among the most essential films ever made about organized labor. Filmed over several years, HARLAN COUNTY USA is a powerful immersion into a small Kentucky town struggling to stay afloat amid a thirteen-month coal miners’ strike as Appalachian grit goes up against the entrenched forces of capitalism. In AMERICAN DREAM, Kopple travels to Austin, Minnesota, to document a Reagan-era meatpackers’ strike against Hormel Foods, capturing the heated backroom negotiations, competing media wars, and devastating human cost of a battle that leaves no part of the community untouched.