Movies: Mimi Pickering

Decades after leaving Appalachia, a daughter returns to eastern Kentucky to excavate her father’s remarkable filmmaking legacy and examine the pull home still has on her....

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is a first person documentary about the extraordinary life of this American civil rights leader. Braden was hailed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail as a white southerner whose rejecti...

A West Virginia community is deeply divided over potentially life and death questions over a local chemical plant that fuels the area's fragile economy....

Born in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, Gunning suffered a life of bitter poverty which became the fuel for dozens of moving songs about working people, the mines, and the great coal strikes of the twenties and thirties. In Mimi Pickering's 1988 ...

In 1972 a coal-waste dam owned by the Pittston Company collapsed at the head of a crowded hollow in southern West Virginia. A wall of sludge, debris, and water tore through the valley below, leaving in its wake 125 dead and 4,000 homeless. Interviews...

In their efforts to better their children’s education, the residents of this small West Virginia community found themselves face to face with an unfeeling, bureaucratic political structure. "Struggle of Coon Branch Mountain" documents their fight for...

Filmed ten years after the flood, Buffalo Creek Revisited looks at the second disaster on Buffalo Creek, in which the survivors’ efforts to rebuild the communities shattered by the flood are thwarted by government insensitivity and a century-old patt...