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.