Elaine McMillion Sheldon
Requisite Media (US: Limited release, from 11 August;Â UK: Release to be announced)
Advertisement
What happens when a community is sustained by a ? Elaine McMillion Sheldon, director of Heroin(e), the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary about the US opioid epidemic, looks for answers as she revisits the mining community she used to call home in central Appalachia, and journeys to other fossil fuel-dependent towns in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee for her new factual film King Coal.
“As far back as I can remember,” narrates Sheldon, “coal has been leaving this place on barges, trucks and trains.” To her family of three generations of miners, it is their lifeblood; to  and “unglamorous black rock”.
Today, fewer than 12,000 people work in the coal industry in West Virginia at the heart of central Appalachia, but mining has left a deep black mark on the region. We see coal being dangled from a bucket crane for children to play with during an outdoor Christmas fair. In her voice-over, Sheldon recalls the impact of this fuel on her father and his predecessors. Among many horrors, we hear that during the first world war, miners were reportedly safer on the frontline than they were at work.
Those statistics didn’t make the industry less attractive, especially to boys. As a child, Sheldon’s brother likened entering a coal shaft to space exploration, while vintage public information films show men shaving with coal axes and say that “soot-coloured lives could be beautiful”. By the late 1930s, 140,000 people in Appalachia were working underground and living in mining company-owned towns. “The king was formed by our desire for more,” remarks Sheldon, noting that the fossil fuel offered warmth, light and jobs.
This dichotomy continues today. While schoolchildren are taught what an underground methane explosion will do to human eyeballs (you don’t want to know), the children also take part in shovel contests and join in prayers that start “Father, we thank you for this rich resource”. Players in the West Virginian Mingo Central football team, dubbed “The Miners”, each pat the lucky black nugget before a game, while local marathon runners are doused in celebratory coal dust.
“The king isn’t alive today, not like he was,” observes Sheldon of the industry’s grip on central Appalachia. Even those local residents who celebrate their heritage with mining tattoos are aware of coal’s precariousness: as a child, Sheldon’s own family moved around the coal fields seven times in 12 years while her father sought work.
The film shows how the transition away from mining might develop, first via the landscape slowly recovering its natural colours, and then by exploring the area’s coal museum. Here, visitors learn that coal is geologically inefficient: an ex-pit worker explains that to make just a foot (0.3 metres) of coal requires 30 feet (about 9 metres) of “dead logs and leaves and things”. Like the teen programmer inspired to build an app that features a playable coal canary, there is hope that the local economy will be able to mine something else – possibly memories – as efficiently as it once did fossil fuels.
While the “black diamonds” that sustained Sheldon’s former community are coming to an end, the local residents’ resourcefulness, work ethic, integrity and care for each other appear to be renewable. We see the work of miners commemorated via modern union marches, and even a ceremony where a royal effigy – perhaps the king of the title – is buried in a homemade coffin.
As observers underground in the vault of Basilica of Saint-Denis, Paris, once famously exclaimed: “The king is dead. Long live the king.”
