Barbara Kopple, a landmark film and new award

American director Barbara Kopple will be a special guest at the 67th Festival dei Popoli. Fifty years since her 1976 Oscar-winning film Harlan County, U.S.A., the filmmaker will be in Florence to present her landmark debut film on 3 November. On this occasion, she will be presented with the “Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema” award, in collaboration with Calliope Arts Foundation. The tribute will take place during the international documentary film festival, from 31 October to 8 November.

Barbara Kopple is the first director to win two Oscars for Best Documentary – for Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990) – and the first woman to receive this honour for a feature-length film. She has been nominated for nine Emmys for her work in television and documentary film, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. “Among the films that have shaped the history of documentary cinema – and not just that genre – is Harlan County, U.S.A., made during the 1970s in the United States, a decade of profound disillusionment and disorientation following the political assassinations, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which had deeply undermined an entire nation’s trust in the institutions that governed it. The tension of that era is strongly felt in the work of a director who, not yet thirty, took her place on the front line alongside the workers, unafraid of soot and beatings. At a time when documentary cinema had retreated into autobiography and diary-style formats, Barbara Kopple reclaimed its role as a vehicle for social criticism and its political power, charting a course that the festival today resolutely reaffirms in order to offer solidarity not only to those fighting for just causes, but also to filmmakers around the world who bear witness to these struggles.” (Alessandro Stellino, Artistic Director of the Festival dei Popoli)

The director will take to the stage at the Festival dei Popoli on the evening of Tuesday 3 November at the Cinema La Compagnia in Florence, where she will receive the “Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema” award, presented in collaboration with the Calliope Arts Foundation. This will be followed by a screening of the restored version of her 1976 masterpiece, a portrait of the historic strike by miners at the Brookside Mine in south-eastern Kentucky. In 1991, Harlan County, U.S.A. was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and designated an “American Film Classic”; the film has been restored and preserved by the Women’s Preservation Fund in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive.