{"id":717323,"date":"2026-03-17T18:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T15:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/harlan-county-usa-director-barbara-kopple-isnt-done-with-labor-just-yet\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T18:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T15:20:13","slug":"harlan-county-usa-director-barbara-kopple-isnt-done-with-labor-just-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/harlan-county-usa-director-barbara-kopple-isnt-done-with-labor-just-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Harlan County, USA\u2019 Director Barbara Kopple Isn\u2019t Done With Labor Just Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n\tWhen documentarian Barbara Kopple directs a film about the labor movement, she tends to go big.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith 1976\u2019s Harlan County, USA<\/em>, she documented the dramatic 13-month strike waged by Kentucky coal miners against the Eastover Mining Company, filming armed standoffs and violent altercations between workers and management. In 1990\u2019s American Dream<\/em> Kopple tackled the failed 1985-1986 strike waged by meatpacking workers against a Minnesota Hormel Foods plant, capturing the splintering of a union in real time. Both films won the Academy Award for best documentary.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, Kopple is returning to the subject of worker organizing with a new film interweaving three separate but interconnected labor stories in and around New York City. Since 2023 Kopple has been documenting delivery workers, including those working for Amazon, UPS and food-delivery app<\/a>s, in their fight for higher wages and improved working conditions. Some of her subjects have unions (UPS drivers and part-time loaders are represented by the Teamsters, for instance, who are also organizing Amazon workers) and others do not, such as the so-called \u201cdeliveristas\u201d working for apps.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese are three stories that are New York. It\u2019s not Kentucky, it\u2019s not Minnesota, it\u2019s New York,\u201d says the filmmaker, who spoke about the film ahead of receiving the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival\u2019s Lens of Power Tribute award on April 9. \u201cAnd I just wanted to see what was happening, really, with modern-day unionism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat she has learned so far has struck her. Even for someone accustomed to covering tough workplaces, Kopple is disturbed by some of the stories. Working in warehouses is dangerous and physically taxing, she notes, with packages sometimes falling from on high. At Amazon, she says, it\u2019s an ethos of \u201cget fired [or] get hurt, keep going.\u201d At UPS, too, she adds, \u201cThey [workers] to go faster and faster and faster and they\u2019ll hurt their legs or somebody in their family will be very sick. [Workers will] ask, \u2018Can I have to go to the hospital?\u2019 And they\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, it\u2019s either your job or your family. Make the decision.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe was gratified that the New York City Council passed a measure<\/a> in late 2025 requiring apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats to give food delivery workers a justification and a chance to appeal in the event they are deactivated, or fired. That\u2019s because \u201c[App companies] used to be able to just fire them for anything. Like if a liquor store canceled an order, for example, they\u2019d be fired and have no way except listening to robots on the telephone to get an appeal,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tKopple is taking her usual cinema verit\u00e9 approach to the film as much as possible, embedding with union organizers and workers on the ground, avoiding staged, sit-down interviews when possible. Still, she\u2019s found embedding with workers more difficult in New York in the early 2020s than it was in Kentucky in the \u201870s or Minnesota in the \u201880s.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeople are afraid for their jobs because they live in a place where it costs a lot of money to live, so they\u2019re not as open maybe as they were in Harlan County<\/em> or American Dream<\/em>,\u201d she explains. \u201cYou just really have to be there and struggle to really understand. Even if you\u2019ve been there two years, it\u2019s still hard. You would never want to be a person responsible for getting somebody to lose their job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKopple is now both continuing to film and editing the movie against the backdrop of President Donald Trump\u2019s administration, which has taken a far more combative stance against labor than his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Trump\u2019s White House has also transformed arts funding for documentary filmmakers like Kopple. In 2025 the administration canceled numerous National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities grants, once a key source of support for documentary filmmakers and organizations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe White House\u2019s actions have spooked even independent foundations that in the past helped finance documentaries, Kopple says. \u201cThey\u2019re scaring the foundations that could help. People are afraid to speak out, to say anything,\u201d she says. \u201cSo we\u2019re on our own.\u201d Kopple said she has relied on individuals who care about her work to fund her latest project so far.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, having to get creative with funding isn\u2019t new for her: On American Dream<\/em>, she in part bankrolled the film by soliciting donations<\/a> from Catholic groups. \u201cThere was a pastoral letter in which there was a section on the economic crisis, plant closings and wage concessions,\u201d she explained to BOMB<\/em> magazine in 1992. \u201cWhat we were doing fit right in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDistribution will be another hurdle. A previous documentary that touched on the Staten Island warehouse union drive at Amazon, called Union<\/em>, struggled to find a distributor when it was released to rave reviews in 2024; the film from Brett Story and Stephen Maing ended up self-distributing. \u00a0\u201cA couple of distributors said, really honestly, \u2018We have a working relationship to Amazon Studios and we cannot risk that arrangement,\u2019\u201d Story told THR <\/em>that year.<\/p>\n

\n\tKopple knows that this part of the journey may not be easy. \u201cI\u2019m going to do whatever I have to do for distribution,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the obstacles, Kopple loves that she\u2019s back covering worker organizing. She believes it\u2019s important to be telling these stories. Calling it an \u201canti-union time,\u201d she said, \u201cremaining silent is worse.\u201d She added, \u201cYou just have to be out there making films, singing songs, writing pieces that penetrate people\u2019s hearts and souls and continue on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When documentarian Barbara Kopple directs a film about the labor movement, she tends to go big. With 1976\u2019s Harlan County, USA, she documented the dramatic 13-month strike waged by Kentucky coal miners against the Eastover Mining Company, filming armed standoffs and violent altercations between workers and management. In 1990\u2019s American Dream Kopple tackled the failed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":717324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2257847979.jpg?crop=0px%2C0px%2C4500px%2C2518px&resize=1440%2C810","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[161157,65799,134764],"class_list":["post-717323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-barbara-kopple","tag-documentaries","tag-labor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}