‘Overburden’: Powerful New Film Doc Captures Big Coal’s Enduring Trauma — And Two Women’s Work to Heal Its Damage – by Jeff Biggers (Huffington Post – September 8, 2015)

 

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While recent headlines hastily declare the death of King Coal, a powerful new film documentary based on seven years of investigation poignantly captures the complexities and largely overlooked stories of the enduring trauma of the coal industry on miners, their families, affected neighbors and the ravaged communities and Appalachian mountains they call home.

As one of the most timely, poetic and informed film documentaries released this year, Overburden: Two Women and the Mountain Between Them, chronicles a quintessential American journey–amid the tragedy of lawlessness in the workplace and the environment–of two courageous women, formerly divided, who shed their fears and find common ground to begin the painful process of dealing with their grief, seeking terms of justice, and healing their damaged communities and mountains.

“We’ve all become family,” Betty, a once fervent pro-coal supporter tells Lorelei, a coal miner’s widow and vocal mountaintop removal mining organizer, in the film. “Don Blankenship has put us together,” she adds, referring to the notorious former Massey Energy CEO. Recognizing the loss of Betty’s brother in the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, as well as her own suffering, Lorelei responds: “Too high of a price to pay, though.”

As featured in Overburden–a chilling mining term that refers to the overlying rock and soil displaced, like besieged residents and miners, to reach underground coal resources–these two former adversaries will stand together when Blankenship finally goes on trial on Oct. 1 in Charleston, West Virginia, for charges of conspiracy to violate mandatory federal mine safety and health standards relating to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which took 29 lives.

To be sure, Lorelei and Betty will not only stand together in solidarity for mine safety and economic diversification.

“There’s a desperate need for healing in the community,” Lorelei says, in one of the most poignant moments in the film, as she packs up her belongings to move away.

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