Aurora Film Society Presents: Harlan County USA

General Admission tickets: $10.00

06:30pm Doors

07:00pm Show Time!

All tickets sales are considered a donation to The Aurora Film society and The Fox Valley Music foundation.

About the Film:

Harlan County USA [1976 / Barbara Kopple]

The 50th anniversary of the release of this film! Winner of the Best Documentary Oscar in 1977. In 1990, the film was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2014, Sight and Sound published a list of Greatest Documentaries of All Time, and Harlan County, USA was ranked 24th, tied with two other movies.This film documents the "Brookside Strike", a 1973 effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. When director Barbara Kopple and her cameraman Hart Perry showed up on the picket line, the locals were suspicious of their intentions. Rumors flew that a "hippie crew from New York" was sniffing around the strike. When she confronted a striker who told people not to talk to her, she was told: "Girl, you gotta tell people here what you're doin'."Kopple and her crew spent years with the families depicted in the film, documenting the dire straits they encountered while striking for safer working conditions, fair labor practices, and decent wages. She followed them to picket in front of the Stock Exchange in New York City, filming interviews with people affected by black lung disease, and miners being shot at while striking. Kopple chose to film the words and actions of the people themselves and use their voices to tell the story. The music used in Harlan County USA is integral to conveying the culture of the miners. It reflects the culture of the people of Harlan County and shows the power of folk music that was a living part of their culture. Listening to Florence Reece sing the song she wrote “Which Side Are You On” is amazing.When the film was re-released in 2006, critic Roger Ebert praised the film, writing "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, indomitable, courageous. It contains a famous scene where guns are fired at the strikers in the darkness before dawn, and Kopple and her cameraman are knocked down and beaten."

The Aurora Film Society

Since 2018, the Aurora Film Society (AFS) has been broadening our community’s collective horizons by screening great movies together. For $60 a year, our subscribers are shown 12 carefully selected & curated movies, works that are historically important & groundbreaking, works that provide a window into far-flung cultures, works that are sometimes overlooked or unavailable to most audiences. The AFS puts a special emphasis on showing the sorts of luminous & idiosyncratic stories from beyond the mainstream that people of the Fox Valley area would normally not have a chance to see in a theatrical setting. We screen every third Wednesday of the month at The Venue.
For questions and/or to subscribe, please email [email protected]
To see our current schedule & past movies, visit aurorafilmsociety.org

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