Harlan County U.S.A.

Harlan County U.S.A. is a documentary about a coal miners' strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1973. Miners at the Brookside mine, owned by the Eastover Mining Company, joined the United Mine Workers of America and asked the company to sign a contract. When Eastover refused, the miners walked out, and the strike lasted more than a year. Armed company guards and strikebreakers confronted picketing miners and the women who stood with them, and the film follows the community's long fight to keep the strike alive against a company focused on its own interests.

Barbara Kopple directed and produced the film, her first feature, made through Cabin Creek Films. It records the strike and places it in the wider history of mining labor and the UMWA. Those appearing include Norman Yarborough, then president of Eastover Mining, UMW organizer Houston Elmore, UMW staff member Phil Sparks, and several women from the mining community, among them Bessie Lou Cornett Parker, Sudie Crusenberry and Mary Lou Fergerson.

The film runs 104 minutes and was released in 1976. Kopple went on to direct American Dream, The Hamptons, Havoc, Bearing Witness, Desert One and Union Town. On IMDb it holds a rating of 8.2 from about 7,400 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 7.6 from 122 votes.