One of the most anticipated films of its day, Harlan County, U.S.A. evoked enormous response from audiences. With considerable compassion, Kopple covered the year-long struggle of a Kentucky coal miners’ strike, beginning in the summer of 1973 when men at the Brookside Mine in Harlan voted to join the United Mine Workers of America. Picket lines, strike breakers, injunctions, arrests and jailings, and a murder mobilized a community to fight for its rights with both company owners and the union. Kopple’s ability to get astonishingly close to her subjects, and her analysis, produce a documentary that is not the least bit objective, but rather heroic or manipulative, depending on the point of view.