As part of Trailblazers, The Garden Cinema presents a landmark double bill featuring two films from 1976 that document women’s contributions to the labour movement.

The screening on Saturday 9 November will be briefly introduced by season programmer Alice Pember and followed by an informal post-film discussion in The Garden Cinema Bar, where we will be joined by film critic Christina Newland. There will be a comfort break between the two screenings.

Union Maids (1976, 59m)

Painting a collective portrait of labour organizers that were active in Chicago in the 1930s, Union Maids offers an important and compelling insight into the lives of three women at the forefront of the labour movement in the US. Celebrated upon release, the film’s assemblage of old and new documentary footage, still images and talking head interviews attests to the tenacity (and efficacy) of working-class women in the fight for class equality, offering an optimistic view that was no doubt as invigorating for viewers at the time of its release as it is today.

Harlan County, USA (1976, 103m)

Winning the 1976 Academy Award for ‘Best Documentary Feature’, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA offers a comparatively present-tense view of the frontline of the then-recent ‘Brookside Strike’, a series of actions taken against the Duke Power Company by miners and their wives in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973. A product of four years of preparation, filming and editing (during which Kopple lived alongside her subjects in Harlan) the film captures key developments in the strike with an immediacy that attests to her rapport with her subjects. As well as being an important document of working-class solidarity and the intersection of class and gendered liberation, the film also raises important questions about documentary ethics and documentary filmmaking making as feminist praxis.

Saturday 9 November Event Timings

16:00  Welcome (Alice Pember)

16:05  Programme start  

19:15  Discussion (Garden Bar)

20:00  Expected finish

Dr Alice Pember is an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include independent cinema, feminist film philosophy and dance and pop music on screen. Her research has appeared in Modern and Contemporary France, French Screen Studies and Film-Philosophy journals. She teaches across areas related to independent French, British and American cinema, film philosophy and queer and women's cinema. Her monograph The Dancing Girl in Contemporary Cinema will be published next year with Edinburgh University Press.

Christina Newland is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster on film and culture, with bylines at Criterion, BBC, Rolling Stone, MUBI, and others. She is the lead film critic at the i Newspaper and a contributing editor to Empire Magazine. Her newsletter, Sisters Under the Mink, on depictions of women in crime film and television, won a Freelance Writing Award in 2021, and her first book, an edited anthology called She Found It at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema, was published in March 2020.