 |
| Elaine McMillion Sheldon's film depicts growing up in the shadow of coal. (Sundance Film Festival Photo) |
Sheldon grew up "roving around West Virginia. Like many children of Appalachia, her world was shaped by coal – her father worked for a mining company, and the family moved to seven coal fields in 12 years for his job," reports Adrian Horton of The Guardian. "Her brother became a fourth-generation miner." Sheldon told Horton: "Everybody in my community worked in the coal mines. If you were going to stay there and work, if you weren't a doctor or a lawyer, that's what you did." Only when Sheldon left the region to study abroad, did she realize how much coal infiltrated Appalachian life. "Not everywhere has a king," she told Horton. "Not everywhere is completely dominated by this industry that controls everything from our rituals to the ways we live our life."
Sheldon's documentary "blooms in the resource's shadow," Horton writes. "It's a lyrical and visually lush ode to a region of immense richness, to mountains riven by extractive industry, to identity-shaping labor and unions, to the inheritance of coal culture. There are no location markers, no delineation between towns, states, mines, mountains." Sheldon told him, "We just define it as the kingdom," a common culture and economy without strict borders.
Sheldon shot all over the Appalachian coalfield, from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. She told Horton, "I'm very aware of how people perceive Appalachia. . . . . I grew up feeling that the place I was from was somewhere to be embarrassed of, and I don't want people to feel that. . . . I want people to see that it's a beautiful place, that there's actual hope here and resilience here." Sheldon says in the film, "Maybe you've heard a story about us. . . . This story is about what it's like to live under King Coal."
The film follows two Appalachian girls, one white and one black, through their lives under coal's reign. "The girls harken to Sheldon’s bygone youth and also point forward, to a life less molded by coal," Horton writes. "As Sheldon puts it in the film, coal has been leaving Appalachia for as long as she’s been alive – in barges downriver, in profits reaped elsewhere, in flattened mountaintops and contamination, in lost jobs." Sheldon told Horton: “If you just look at the facts and figures of mining employment, none of this makes any sense. . . . People just want to work. They’re happy to do other work if it pays the same and provides the same amount of stability, but the coal industry hasn’t provided that stability for many years. And so the question now is, what’s next?”
"To begin answering the question, Sheldon staged a symbolic funeral for King Coal, which serves as the film’s conclusion," Horton writes. "She invited real people with real connections to mining to send off the resource economy as they saw fit, in song or in prose." Sheldon told Horton: “To some people, King Coal is the greedy industrialists, and to some people, he’s the person that provided their jobs." Horton adds, "To Heather Hannah, a singer from Thomas, W.Va., who offered a gut punch of a coal eulogy, it was 'the paradox of pride and remorse. How my daddy was proud to do what needed to be done, to work the mines and provide for our family. I learned that you can be proud of your life, and want better for them that come after you.'”
The film follows two Appalachian girls, one white and one black, through their lives under coal's reign. "The girls harken to Sheldon’s bygone youth and also point forward, to a life less molded by coal," Horton writes. "As Sheldon puts it in the film, coal has been leaving Appalachia for as long as she’s been alive – in barges downriver, in profits reaped elsewhere, in flattened mountaintops and contamination, in lost jobs." Sheldon told Horton: “If you just look at the facts and figures of mining employment, none of this makes any sense. . . . People just want to work. They’re happy to do other work if it pays the same and provides the same amount of stability, but the coal industry hasn’t provided that stability for many years. And so the question now is, what’s next?”
"To begin answering the question, Sheldon staged a symbolic funeral for King Coal, which serves as the film’s conclusion," Horton writes. "She invited real people with real connections to mining to send off the resource economy as they saw fit, in song or in prose." Sheldon told Horton: “To some people, King Coal is the greedy industrialists, and to some people, he’s the person that provided their jobs." Horton adds, "To Heather Hannah, a singer from Thomas, W.Va., who offered a gut punch of a coal eulogy, it was 'the paradox of pride and remorse. How my daddy was proud to do what needed to be done, to work the mines and provide for our family. I learned that you can be proud of your life, and want better for them that come after you.'”
No comments:
Post a Comment