Harlan County, U.S.A.

This film, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1977, is not only one of the most consummate examples of observational cinema ever seen; it is also a heartrending record of the passionate resistance and uncompromising militance of human dignity. The struggle between coal miners and the callous management board of the Duke Power Company in Harlan County, Kentucky, between 1973 and 1974 (a strike lasting a full 13 months) is documented here by the ever-moving camera of Barbara Kopple exactly as it happened: an agonizing chronicle of dangerous clashes with unpredictable results, a nerve-wracking thriller written by reality itself (and by the realities of class struggle). At the peak intensity of its traumatic truth, the injustice of labor exploitation offers the filmmaker a material that is powerfully timeless. Yet more proof that cinema can capture the deafening eruption of a historical moment in all its sweeping power.

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Direction: Barbara Kopple

Cinematography: Kevin Keating, Hart Perry, Phil Parmet, Flip McCarthy, Tom Hurwitz

Editing: Mary Lampson, Nancy Baker

Sound: Barbara Kopple

Music: Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis

Production: Cabin Creek Films

Producers: Barbara Kopple

Format: DCP

Color: Color, B&W

Production Country: USA

Production Year: 1976

Duration: 104'

Contact: Cabin Creek Films

Awards/Distinctions: Best Documentary Feature Film – Academy Awards 1977, Best Documentary – Los Angeles Film Critics Association 1977, National Film Registry – Library of Congress 1991, One of the Top Five Documentaries of All Time – International Documentary Association 2007

Barbara Kopple

Filmography

1976 Harlan County U.S.A.
1990 American Dream
1997 Wild Man Blues
2005 Bearing Witness (co-direction)
2011 A Force of Nature
2015 Miss Sharon Jones!
2017 A Murder in Mansfield
2018 New Homeland
2019 Desert One
2022 Gumbo Coalition