Two women and the mountain between them

When an errant spark ignited the methane leaking in the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010, a fireball ripped through miles of underground tunnels in Appalachia’s coal country, killing everything it touched – including 29 men. In the aftermath of the devastating explosion, two former political enemies are united by the toll the disaster takes on their families and community: a right-wing pro-coal activist joins forces with a tree-hugging grandmother to take down the most dangerous coal company in the United States.

Featured

Chad A. Stevens, Director & Cinematographer

Chad A. Stevens is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, editor, journalist and teacher. After beginning this project in 2006, the lion’s share of Stevens’ work has centered on environmental documentary. These efforts have led to many awards, most notably an Emmy in New Approaches in Documentary for his collaboration in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning project, Caught in the Crossfire. Other awards include a Special Merit Award from the Grantham Prize, an Alfred I. DuPont - Columbia University Award silver baton and a win at the SXSW Interactive Festival. Stevens’ first short, Leveling Appalachia, received the National Magazine Award for Digital Media and has been used in university curricula across the country.

Catherine Orr, Producer & Editor

Catherine Orr is the co-founder of StoryMineMedia, a documentary production studio that produces independent projects and partners with nonprofits, foundations, and other organizations to create video stories that move people to action. Orr is a graduate of the master’s program at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow, and the editor-in-chief of Coal: A Love Story, an interactive documentary funded by the Carnegie and Knight initiative. Her individual and collaborative work has been recognized by SXSW Interactive and the Grantham Prize for Environmental Journalism.

Elena Rue, Producer & Editor

Elena Rue is the co-founder of StoryMineMedia, a visual storytelling company specializing in documentary storytelling. She is part-time program director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where she also teaches multimedia classes. She spent three years coordinating the Literacy Through Photography program at the Center for Documentary Studies, working with teachers in Durham and abroad to use photography as a tool for learning in the classroom. She is a 2011 graduate of the master’s program at the University of North
Carolina - Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism.

Barb Lee, Story Consultant

Barb Lee is the founder of Point Made Films. Lee is a documentary film director, producer and executive producer. She directed Adopted and has acted as producer for several other projects, including I'm Not Racist, Am I?, Prep School Negro and 500 Words or Less. The work of Point Made Films explores identity in American society.

Toby Shimin, Consulting Editor

Toby Shimin – a distinguished documentary film editor for nearly two decades. Her most recent film, How to Dance in Ohio premiered at Sundance in 2015 and was broadcast on HBO 2015. Shimin began her film career as a sound editor, where she worked on such projects as Fire from the Mountain and Working Girls, winning a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She switched to picture editing in 1988 when she cut The Children’s Storefront, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary. Since then, she has cut numerous films that have been accepted at Sundance, including A Leap of Faith, Martha and Ethel, and Out of the Past, which won an Audience Award. She has edited several projects for PBS, including AIDS Warriors for the 2003 season of Wide Angle and two projects for American Experience: Miss America, which premiered at Sundance in 2002; and Seabiscuit, for which she received a 2003 Emmy nomination. More recently she edited episode two of the Emmy-nominated Reporting America at War, Three of Hearts: A Post-Modern Family, which premiered in September 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival, and Two Square Miles which was part of the 2006 Independent Lens series on PBS, Everything’s Cool, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and A Sea Change has won several festival awards, including the NOAA 2010 Environmental Hero award and was screened and broadcast internationally. A recent project, Buck, won the 2011 Audience Award at Sundance.

Tyler Strickland, Composer

Tyler Strickland is a film composer and songwriter based in Los Angeles. Tyler scores have been heard in the 2015 Sundance film Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary about the amateur pornography industry produced by Rashida Jones, as well as Fresh Dressed, the star-studded, CNN-produced documentary about the history of urban fashion. Tyler has also scored other 2015 films, The Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano (Tribeca Film Festival, Sheffield Doc Film Festival), and Overburden (Full Frame Doc Film Festival). Tyler’s scores have accompanied other acclaimed documentary films such as The Genius of Marian (Tribeca Film Festival 2013), Tough Love (Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2014), Emmy-Winning series from NPR in 2014, Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt, and more.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Having grown up in Kentucky, I thought I knew Appalachia. I thought I knew what it meant to be a coal miner. I thought I understood the ways in which the land had shaped the people. I thought I knew what it looked like to raise a family there, to provide, to do what’s right. But after beginning this project nearly 10 years ago, I learned that it’s a place of coal and contradictions.

This film is largely about those contradictions. For those on the outside, like myself, the answers seem easy. Coal is bad. Water is life. Don’t blow up the mountains. What’s hard to see from the outside is the reason folks are so dedicated to the very industry that ultimately, and statistically, ends their lives 10 years earlier than other Americans. This is because the region has been engineered to support only one economy, a coal economy, leaving families with only one option: a job in the coal mine. Even though that very coal company may blow up your land, it’s also the company that signs your paychecks, that gives you health insurance, and that feeds your children. And people fight fiercely to defend their families.

In the process called mountaintop removal coal mining, “overburden” is a term used to define the rock, soil, trees and ecosystem that lie above a seam of coal. This overburden is blasted and bulldozed away to access the coal below. It is shoved into valleys, discarded, much like the people who live and work in those valleys are cast aside. The goal of this film is to humanize those people, to explore the complicated issues and to spark conversation that can move beyond the expected and polarizing debates and allow viewers to access an empathetic view of a people and a place that few Americans truly understand.