Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack, with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece, the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.
Up Next in Documentaries
-
Salesman
Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1969 • United States
This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four ...
-
Gap-Toothed Women
Directed by Les Blank • 1987 • United States
Filmmaker Les Blank breezily questions our commonly accepted standards of beauty with this paean to women with extra-wide dental spaces.
-
Festival
Directed by Murray Lerner • 1967 • United States
Before WOODSTOCK and MONTEREY POP, there was FESTIVAL. From 1963 through 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon. Joan Baez, Bo...
