New York native Barbara Kopple has been a vital and socially progressive voice in documentary filmmaking for the past three decades, bringing a compassionate and unblinking scrutiny to the lives of miners, meatpackers, professional musicians, journalists and even disgraced boxing champ Mike Tyson. In her career-making, hard-hat couplet Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990), Kopple illuminated two of the more shameful episodes in recent U.S. labor history, demonstrating an abiding sympathy for the struggles of ordinary people and training her gimlet eye on the ironies and ignominies of economic oppression.

One of the founding members of the collaborative group that produced Winter Soldier (1972), a soldier's-eye view of atrocities in Vietnam with disturbing parallels to Bush Inc.'s military misadventures, Kopple began making films while attending college in West Virginia. In 1973, she spent a year living in a small Kentucky town filming the ugly, embittered, ultimately violent conflict between workers seeking a union contract from their overlords at Eastover Mining Company, and the gun-wielding scabs sent into their midst by greedy coal operators and their lapdogs in local law enforcement. Kopple, who was targeted by one goon for hoisting a camera during an early-morning picket-line melee (a chilling incident plainly visible in the Criterion DVD of the film), won an Academy Award for Harlan County, U.S.A in 1976.