Documentarian Barbara Kopple Is Still on the Front Lines
Documentarian Barbara Kopple Is Still on the Front Lines
Maxwell RabbTue, May 5, 2026 at 4:45 PM UTC
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Barbara Kopple Is Still on the Front LinesJanus Films
It took a car crash for documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple to win the trust of the Kentucky coal miners during the 1973 Harlan County strike.
At first, union leaders shrugged off her and her camera crew as a group of hippies, teasing her with nicknames like Florence Nightingale and Martha Washington. But that changed when, staying at a motel on Pine Mountain, Kopple and her crew flipped their car. Undeterred and (luckily) uninjured, her team hauled their equipment through the rain to the picket line. “From that moment on, they opened up,” Kopple tells me on a recent video call. “We stayed in their homes, we had each other’s backs—that’s how it started.”
Kopple, now 79, stayed on the picket line. It was her first film: Harlan County, USA, a now-beloved document of the labor movement that went on to win the Academy Award for best documentary in 1976. From there, Kopple crafted a filmography defined by its cinema vérité style, observing labor movements firsthand and telling profoundly human stories across the United States. Among her roughly 50 films, American Dream (often considered a companion film about labor injustice, this time aimed at Hormel Foods in Minnesota, which took home another Oscar in 1991) has been newly restored in 4K. At the same time, Janus Films re-released Harlan County for its 50th anniversary. Both returned to theaters on May 1, helping “the next generation understand how important it is to have a union,” as she puts it.
Still from Harlan County, USA (1976)Janus Films
Harlan County—a vigorously told, incredibly human story—remains close to Kopple’s heart. “If I could have a film that was a best friend, it would be Harlan County,” she says. She embarked on this project at 26, after hearing on the radio about the struggles of Appalachian coal miners. She traveled to Harlan County to film the Miners for Democracy, a reform movement that first erupted into national headlines in 1969 after labor leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his family were murdered on the orders of the sitting president of the United Mine Workers, Tony Boyle.
Kopple believed she was making a film about this power struggle. But as she followed Arnold Miller (Miners for Democracy’s challenger to Boyle), the story unfolded in a different direction. Miller, she tells me, promised to “organize the unorganized.” And he did; by June 1973, Kopple was on the front lines of the region’s largest coal strike since the 1930s, in a region once known as “Bloody Harlan County” for its brutal strikes, where Brookside miners were facing off against Duke Power.
The young documentary filmmaker cut her teeth on this project. “I learned what life and death were all about,” she says. In particular, she credits Lois Scott, the fierce labor leader of the Brookside Women’s Club, who, during the film, suddenly pulls a gun from her dress. “I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful and brave and passionate about working people,” she says. But more than anything, this experience taught her what it takes to tell such an intimate story.
Still from Harlan County, USA (1976)Janus Films
“You always have to be there in order to be able to have access and really get people to open up and become part of the community,” Kopple says. “In every film I’ve done, I live there, I stay there, I become part of them, and for me, it’s so incredible to be able to do that: to see what people are thinking and feeling. You have to be the first one up in the morning and the last one to go to sleep at night.”
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Kopple’s work embraces cinema vérité in style without fully adopting its neutrality. She observes and documents the real struggles of these communities, but in doing so, places these issues into the national dialogue. “Even when we didn’t have film anymore to put in the camera, we would be there because, if there’s a camera crew there, they don’t want to do hostile things or hurt people. I used to say back then, ‘You don’t want to show shooting in living color,’” she says.
A decade after Harlan, Kopple plunged into another (arguably more volatile) labor conflict with American Dream. Just as before, she arrived almost by chance, catching wind of the strike at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, via the radio. The food-industry titan cut workers’ pay from $10.69 to $8.25 an hour (despite its $29 million profit). What Kopple found wasn’t just another David and Goliath story between worker and corporation, but one that proved much more complicated; one that fractured families as much as it did trade unions.
Still from American Dream (1991)Janus Films
American Dream is a difficult portrait of the United States; a “gray” story in Kopple’s words. It, of course, damns Hormel’s corporate greed but also presents a flawed portrait of the clashing labor leaders, showing just how difficult the strike was on workers and their families. Kopple juggled many perspectives in this film, so she felt “petrified” when she first screened it to the people involved at a high school auditorium in 1990. “At the end of the film, 1,500 people stood and clapped and clapped, and what they were clapping for was what they did, and some people came up to me and said, ‘This is going to start the healing again,’” Kopple recalls.
What is the power behind a documentary? Kopple believes these works allow people to band together, to think of another person with compassion. She recalls one screening of Harlan County in Dallas, where a woman stood up in the crowd and yelled, “I’ve been a Republican all my life, and after seeing your film, girl, I’m gonna rethink my whole situation on unions.” Kopple is energized by this potential for change, for reconsideration of one’s worldview for the better.
Still from American Dream (1991)Janus Films
“It’s a beautiful thing to see people band together, and work together, and be really a great community, coming together to do something that they all believe in,” says Kopple. “Those are the things that you remember, that you were actually getting somebody to think or to feel in a different way, or to understand who people are.”
Kopple is still on the front lines. She’s in New York now, filming a documentary on UPS workers, Amazon delivery drivers, and the Deliveristas who, as she puts it, “deliver you your noodle soup when you get sick.” As always, Kopple goes straight to where the story is. While everyone else treats delivery like a God-given right, she keeps her camera on the people carrying the brunt of it.
“Most people want to talk to us, or want us to film, because they don’t want to have their history be silenced, and the only way to get out there is to talk about what’s happening: who you are, what you’re doing, what your dreams are, and then people will feel something and understand you,” Kopple says. In this sense, documentaries are a dynamo of compassion, stirring the hearts of audiences.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
