Barbara Kopple closes 50-year labour trilogy with Union Town
Fifty years after she took a camera into a Kentucky coal strike, Barbara Kopple has closed the circle with a new labour documentary.
The title is Union Town. It had its United States premiere on 19 September 2026 in Camden, Maine, where Kopple discussed the film with Deadline at the Camden Opera House where it screened.
Kopple's first film was Harlan County U.S.A., about a long-running strike at a coal mine in southeast Kentucky, according to that interview. The 1976 documentary earned her an Academy Award.
She earned a second Academy Award for her 1991 documentary American Dream, about a strike at a Hormel Foods plant in Minnesota. That earlier winner is now getting a 4K restoration and theatrical release, Deadline reported in January.
Union Town turns to the present. It follows fights for better wages and working conditions at UPS, at Amazon, and among deliveristas in New York City — the bicycle delivery workers, many of them immigrants, who carry food and parcels across the city.
Two people anchor that story. Antonio Rosario is the Teamsters lead union organiser for Amazon workers in the northeast and a veteran of a 1997 strike at UPS. The film also documents the case of Victor Hidalgo, a 24-year-old pharmacy delivery worker killed in 2024 when a New York Fire Department vehicle hit his bicycle, Deadline reports.
The festival route moved quickly. Union Town bowed at the Venice Film Festival earlier in September, then made its North American premiere at TIFF on 11 September, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Its Camden screening took place on Saturday 19 September at 5.15 p.m. during the 2026 Camden International Film Festival, which ran from 17 to 20 September.
What ties it together is time. Union Town completes a trilogy on labour rights alongside Harlan County, U.S.A. and American Dream, festival programmers noted when announcing the Camden line-up in August. From a Kentucky mine to a Minnesota meat-packing plant to warehouses and city streets, Kopple has kept her camera where the picket line forms.
