Fifty years ago, a young director named Barbara Kopple came out with her first film, a documentary she thought would be little seen.
“When I started making the film, I thought, ‘Oh, my parents will see it and their friends and maybe a museum will show it,’” she recalls.
That film was Harlan County U.S.A., about a long running strike at a coal mine in southeast Kentucky, and it was immediately hailed as brilliant, earning Kopple an Academy Award. She would earn a second Oscar for her 1991 documentary American Dream, about a strike at a Hormel Foods plant
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