CIFF: “King Coal” - Film Review
I’m a coal miner’s granddaughter. My mom’s side of the family lives in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. The kind of small town with one stoplight and that exists because of King Coal. There’s an annual Coal Show with a parade, a carnival, and the coronation of a new Coal Queen. As a kid, you think everyone has the same experiences as you because you’re surrounded by people who are living similar lives. I lived for a few years in that small town and I caught candy thrown from fire trucks that drove along the Coal Show parade route. Part of my family still lives there and I visit when I can. I remember going to the drive-in at the edge of town, the joy of finally being old enough to walk with the Big Kids to the Dairy Queen, and the impossible-to-articulate feelings of longing for a version of the town I’d never get to see.
In popular media, the central Appalachian region hasn’t been presented kindly. Even the mere mention of Appalachia conjures up harmful stereotypes about marrying cousins and “hillbillies.” It’s a region that’s rich in coal but poor in economic wealth. It’s plagued by an opioid crisis and has long been left behind by the world it helped to fuel. King Coal is a documentary that seeks to demystify the region of Central Appalachia for the rest of the world. Its most difficult burden is to explain coal and the hold it has over an entire way of life to the people who only know about coal because Santa puts it in their stocking if they’re bad at Christmas. More than just the title of the documentary, King Coal is a personification of the natural resource. Its power and stranglehold over these people is articulated beautifully and lyrically in a voiceover by Elaine McMillion Sheldon.
Introducing the audience to coal through the looming, mythical figure of King Coal allows the film to shed some of the confines of the run-of-the-mill documentary genre. The story of King Coal is told like a fable rather than through stuffy talking-head interview segments. In fact, there are no traditional interviews in the entire film. The feeling is more like a story being shared over a campfire with loved ones. It’s deceptive in its early simplistic approach, before it starts delivering one gut punch after another. The match-cutting technique of forcing the audience to make sense of the juxtaposition of carnival rides to massive coal machinery makes King Coal more difficult to digest than a traditional documentary.
This deviation from the norm gives Sheldon the freedom to infuse a sense of magical realism into the style of her film. West Virginia and the surrounding Appalachian region have never looked better. To those who have lived there, its natural beauty is well-known, but in pop culture, it’s presented as worn-down derelict houses and “simple” people. And yes, those exist, but King Coal explains how that happened. How this land so unbelievably rich in resources could have become the emptiness it is now. Sheldon treats these places and these people with so much love and respect because she’s one of them. She comes into this world already a member of it, so she doesn’t ogle or stare in shock. Instead, she shares her memories and her people.
At the beginning of the film, Sheldon’s voiceover says “there’s a tension between loyalty and truth.” There’s a long history of pain that courses through the region in the name of coal, and there’s also the truth that we need to be pivoting toward more sustainable means of energy. Both can be true, and that can be difficult for an entire region whose livelihood has been a source of both pride and pain.
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