The Nation

05/01/2026

This May Day weekend, possibly the one holiday movie release weekend that Disney does not yet own, Janus Films will bring back director Barbara Kopple’s two Oscar-winning documentaries on the American labor movement, Harlan County, USA (1975) and American Dream (1990). They appear as a double bill in 17 cities for the former’s 50th anniversary and a recently restored 4k print of the latter by Criterion. They tell the stories of two strikes, respectively: a 1973–74 miners strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and a 1985–86 meatpackers strike at a Hormel factory in Austin, Minnesota. The miners won their strike. The meatpackers did not, and well over half the plant’s workers lost their jobs.

Kopple, now 80, has been documenting the United States left since 1972, when she took part in the collective doc Winter Soldier(1972), which featured Vietnam veterans (like John Kerry) recounting atrocities that they witnessed or in which they participated. Since then, her films have covered the military, labor, sports, entertainment, and this very magazine—in Hot Type!: 150 Years of The Nation. Her prescient Johnny Cash and Tricky Dick (2018) and Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing(2006), on how the far right attempts to censor and silence progressive artists, still ring true, as the Trumps target Jimmy Kimmel once again and Stephen Colbert enters his final month before cancellation on CBS.

Kopple shot her films in the cinema verité style, crossing the purely observational line of traditional documentary to get in close with hand-held cameras, using natural lighting, and finding herself part of the story when strikebreakers physically attacked and shot at her crew in Harlan County while she filmed on the line with workers. The style has been parodied in everything from This is Spinal Tap! to The Office, but in the hands of a master like Kopple, it still resonates powerfully.