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We invite you to discuss one of the most significant labor history documentaries ever made, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A. This Academy Award winning film documents a community in eastern Kentucky divided by a strike at its coal mine and gets to the heart of labor conflict in 1970s America.

Interweaving her own footage with archival photographs and film, Kopple sets the miners’ effort to unionize into the larger history of the contentious relationship between the mining corporations and the people who toil for them. She lived with the Harlan County families for 13 months and grew close to them, which enabled her to document their story with striking intimacy and compassion. The women especially captivated her: they organized, agitated, and put their lives at risk on the picket line, using their bodies to block the strikebreakers and their gun-wielding allies.

The film’s soundtrack gives it additional power and roots it firmly to its place. Kopple chose songs indigenous to eastern Kentucky and the surrounding Appalachian region and commissioned path-breaking bluegrass artist Hazel Dickens to write a number of new songs. The music embodies the staunch determination of the miners and their families in their confrontation with the mine operators.

We invite you to watch this hour-and-forty-five minute film on your using this link, then join us for a conversation via Zoom.

Free and open to all

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