THE CURATORS QUADERNO - Issue 10 Resilience and Resistance: The Cinema of Barbara Kopple

A tribute to American documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple for her exploration of US labour rights over 50 years.

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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. To celebrate her 50 years of filmmaking, Kopple recently released a new film, Union Town – on the modern face of labour against the backdrop of the New York cityscape. It was first presented at the Venice International Film Festival in the summer of 2026. This Quaderno was published as a tribute to Kopple during the 67^th Annual Festival dei Popoli in Florence, in (31 October to 8 November 2026), where Kopple became the first winner of a new award, “Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema” created by the festival, in collaboration with the Calliope Arts Foundation.

“[In the 1970s], 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,” says Alessandro Stellino, Artistic Director of the Festival dei Popoli.

This publication’s principal essay, “The Labour Trilogy: Fifty Years of Working-Class History” is by Ludovica Fales, curator for the FdP’s Barbara Kopple Tribute at the FdP. The Curators' Quaderno was created by the Calliope Arts Foundation and Restoration Conversations, in collaboration with The Florentine Press

Sponsors: Calliope Arts Foundation, Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle

Series editor: Linda Falcone

Design and layout: Marco Badiani and Leo Cardini