In June of 1973, workers at the Brookside mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, were at their limit, citing poor pay, minimal or no benefits, and unsafe working conditions as serious problems that weren’t being addressed by their employer. The accident rate was three times the national average. Many workers were dying of black lung disease.

It was inevitable; feeling that they weren’t getting anywhere with their grievances at the Eastover Mining Company or their own representatives, the Southern Labor Union, the miners voted to throw their lot in with the United Mine Workers instead. The situation quickly degenerated. On June 30th the miners walked out, and they stayed out for 13 months.

Battles between gun toting strike breakers and defiant miners periodically erupted, the relationship between Eastover president Norman Yarborough and union representatives degenerating into nasty bickering. There to catch the action was filmmaker Barbara Kopple, who fashioned those many months of footage into the passionate and acutely observed film that won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1977.

A student of the cinéma vérité school, Kopple and her small crew lived with the striking miners, even taking places on the picket line when they couldn’t afford the film stock to record the action. Gaining the trust of their subjects, they were able to catch them in situations that a standard film crew would be unable to–in tension filled meetings, during pointless bickering, and at times of physical danger.

Kopple is not neutral on the subject–she portrays the presidents of Eastover and Duke Power (who own Eastover) as the clear villains of the piece–but she never romanticizes the miners. There’s a slight aura of the mid ’70s New Left around her film, but not to the extent that she uses her subjects as a ready made rack on which to hang an ideology.

She does push it a little with the use of music, which is, admittedly, one of the great pleasures of the film, but the ancient Appalachian ballads and strike songs scattered throughout sometimes seem a little like overkill. There are moments of remarkable intensity in the soundtrack: 74-year-old Florence Reece standing up at a meeting to sing a cracked and emotional "Which Side Are You On," the fiercely pro-union song that she authored in 1931 for a carbon copy Harlan County strike, or Hazel Dickens declaring victory in song at the end. But it isn’t always necessary to have music telegraph strong emotions, as in a vignette where a mother suddenly breaks down at the funeral of her son, the first victim of the violence between strikebreakers and the union. Kopple herself was almost killed in a nighttime gun battle, her screams and wildly shaking camera–catching glimpses of gun shots and flashlights–as frightening a scene as can be found in any Hollywood thriller.

It’s interesting to juxtapose the way that these poor mine workers and their families look at their union with how many people in, say, Alberta now view organized labour. That only 30 years have passed since the strike happened should be a warning to those who think that we would be better off without unions. The residents of Harlan County weren’t so ambivalent, as evidenced by one elderly woman grabbing a picket sign while heading out the door: "They may shoot me, but they can‘t shoot the union out of me."