Barbara Kopple’s feature length film about a coal miners’ strike in
Kentucky. The film’s power comes from Kopple’s intimate involvement
with the people she filmed, the risks she took, the places—jails,
courtrooms, stockholder’s meetings—into which she forced her camera.
Its strength lies not in its beauty, nor even in its politics, but in
the moral authority that is inscribed in every frame. There is no
bloodier chapter in the history of U.S. labor than the struggle of
coal miners, and some of the most violent episodes within this chapter
occurred in Harlan County, Kentucky.