Union Town — Barbara Kopple [Venice ’26 Review]

Few filmmakers have confronted the fractures of modern America with such formal rigor and moral devotion as Barbara Kopple. For several decades, the legendary documentarian has burrowed into her motherland’s fault lines, and her fierce attention to those who bear the cost of its failures and betrayals has remained constant across an otherwise varied body of work. Union Town completes her decades-spanning trilogy on labor rights, and is a total culmination, as she rightly defines it herself. From the coal miners...