Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary

Sight and Sound Greatest Documentaries of All Time - No. 24

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Barbara Kopple’s documentary is a searing portrait of the brutality of 20th-century American capitalism.

Made over the course of four years, Harlan County, USA takes the viewer to the frontlines of a 1973 Kentucky mining strike. Chronicling the increasingly violent attempts of the Duke Power Company to suppress the strike, Kopple even finds her own crew coming under attack from heavies hired by the company.  

Herself a union organiser, Kopple makes no bones of where her sympathies lie. Eschewing narration, she lets the workers and their families tell the story themselves. Filled with memorable local characters and brilliant folk music, Harlan County, USA is a document of a proud and vital working-class culture. 

"Few documentaries rivet you to your seat; this one does. The guts it took to make are up there on the screen, in the footage shot by director Barbara Kopple and cameraman Hart Perry during the violent encounters."

Elliott Stein, Film Comment

"The film retains all of its power, in the story of a miners’ strike in Kentucky where the company employed armed goons to escort scabs into the mines, and the most effective picketers were the miners’ wives — articulate, indominable, courageous."

Roger Ebert