REEL Change Feature: Black Diamonds

November 10 @ 10pm

Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice 
Catherine Pancake (LTA '17, WOO '17, ACG '16)

A feature-length narrative documentary addressing large-scale coal surface mining techniques in Appalachian states and local community resistance to these destructive operations. In many cases, citizens are fighting not just to maintain their heritage and sense of culture, but also for their very lives as they witness heightened water contamination, deaths from flooding, and other mining calamities. Having been born and raised in West Virginia, the artist undertook the project with a sense of "creative triage" in hopes of not only alerting a wider audience to these critical problems, but also to document the communities and cultural values formative to her as a child that are being lost to large scale strip mining