Barbara Kopple's "Union Town" Heads to Ji.hlava After Venice and Toronto
Barbara Kopple's documentary "Union Town" is heading to the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, after screenings at Venice and Toronto. Variety reported the news on 30 October 2026, and described the film as completing Kopple's trilogy on labour rights.
The film follows workers at two of the biggest names in American shipping and online retail. Its subjects include delivery and warehouse staff at UPS and Amazon, along with app-based couriers known as "deliveristas," a Spanish word for delivery workers. Their stories unfold in New York City, where they are organising and striking. The film's dialogue is in English and Spanish.
Kopple has a long record with this subject. She won two Academy Awards for documentaries: "Harlan County U.S.A.," about striking coal miners in Kentucky, and "American Dream," about the 1985-1986 strike at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. She shared the "American Dream" award with Arthur Cohn. Variety noted those wins in its report.
Kopple was born in 1946 and turned 80 in 2026. Her earlier work has a long festival history too. "Harlan County, U.S.A." was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1976, according to TIFF's film listing.
The film also touches on a court case about pay. In 2025, DoorDash agreed to pay $17 million to settle claims that it used customer tips to subsidise the wages of its workers in New York. Variety raised the settlement as background to the film's subject.
Ji.hlava has placed "Union Town" in its Constellations section, and lists its production year as 2026. The festival, which is held in the Czech Republic, is one of the main showcases for documentaries in Central Europe. Its programme is a useful guide to what the film's next stops could look like, though the festival has not announced any further dates for the film.
For audiences who follow labour news, the film turns the lens on jobs that many people use every week without thinking about who does them. The delivery van at the door and the warehouse shift behind the order are both part of the story it tells.
