Harlan County USA

Harlan County USA (1976)

Runtime: 104 minutes

Directed by: Barbara Koppel

Starring: This is a documentary

From: Cabin Creek

Here’s another documentary (I’m a non-fiction fan, remember) and this one I got to see on Hulu via Criterion having it up on there. Yeah, I paid for a month more of it, just so I can check out a few more movies on Hulu Plus.

This one is an Academy Award winning documentary about a bitter coal miner’s strike down in Harlan, Kentucky. That is one rural area, if you just look at it on a map. The workers of the Brookside Mine in that town decided to join the union. The people who own the mine, the Duke Power Company, refused to agree to that deal. So, the workers went on strike. They got some help from the union, but not a lot.

So, those workers had to find other jobs along with pickets and other things to get attention to their plight as “scabs” took their jobs, and the war between the two sides got very serious. You get to see a surprising amount of time spent with the wives of the miners… not a bad thing, as they are “real” characters, as earthy as you can imagine.

The filmmakers were there originally to film something else related to the coal miner’s union; however, once the strike started, they shifted focus. So, not only do you see the strike and its effects on that poor town in Kentucky, but you also see the drama involved with the union itself; it’s quite shocking, actually, what went on with the union. I’m sure you won’t be shocked, though, to learn that coal mining is a real bitch, between black lung’s disease, how dangerous and back-breaking the work is, and all that.

I won’t real too much more as it’d spoil things, but it’s real life drama with a lot of difficult issues presented, and you get to see many rural bucolic people get interviewed and have their side of the story presented, and for that and other reasons, this documentary is sad and yet endlessly captivating at the same time. You should check it out if you love documentaries.

I’ll be back tomorrow night.