The Miners' Hymns
Filmmaker and artist Bill Morrison (Decasia) pries open the past, patching together a hypnotic collage of archival footage to reconstruct England's vanishing mining communities.
Northeast England was once dotted with coal mines, with entire communities living off the black gold pulled from the earth. That all ended after the 1984 miners' strikes, with a brutal wave of police suppression and mine closures.
Morrison's mesmerising film unearths vivid images of the coal towns' heyday, piecing together a lost way of life rich with community and celebration, and marked by intolerably hard and dangerous work.
Screens with the Australian premiere of Release (Bill Morrison, 13 mins, USA, 2010, B&W), an experimental short constructed from archival footage of a crowd awaiting the release of Al Capone from prison.
