Union Town
Barbara Kopple · 2026 · 106 minutes
Nov. 15 · Regal 2 · 11:15 a.m.
Union Town completes Barbara Kopple’s trilogy on labor rights following her Oscar-winning Harlan County, USA and American Dream, two landmark cinéma vérité documentaries. Set against the backdrop of New York City, Union Town follows delivery industry workers as they take on some of the world’s most powerful corporations, revealing the challenges, passion, and humanity at the heart of this growing labor movement.
Programmer’s Note
In 1973, twenty-something Barbara Kopple arrived in Harlan County, Kentucky to document a strike by coal miners at the Brookside Mine. She stayed for the better part of two years, living alongside the striking miners and their families. While there she developed the working methods that would define her distinguished career. “When we ran out of film, we would pretend that we were still filming,” she’s said, “to stand guard and to show the workers that they weren’t alone.” Harlan County, USA (1976) won the Oscar for Best Documentary and is one of the truly great films made in and about Appalachia. Kopple won a second Oscar for American Dream (1990), about the Hormel meatpacking strike in Austin, Minnesota.
In Union Town, Kopple further complicates any simple understanding of the American labor movement by documenting three campaigns operating on very different planes of power and history. At one end are the Teamsters of Local 804, an institution with a century of leverage (and baggage), who come within days of a national strike against UPS. In the middle are warehouse workers at an Amazon facility in Maspeth, Queens, who gear up for battle with one of the world’s largest corporations. And at the far end are the Deliveristas, the mostly immigrant bike couriers who, as noncitizens, have no path to a union at all. Solidarity, it turns out, has multivalent meanings depending on where you stand.
In Harlan County in the 1970s, the miners knew exactly who they were up against: the company’s hired guns stared them down from the other side of the picket line. Many of the workers in Union Town don’t have even that luxury. We see a Deliverista lose his livelihood not to a foreman but to an algorithm, a “deactivation” triggered by data automations and delivered by an app, leaving little recourse for the worker. It’s one of the “increasingly frightening layers of complexity” Kopple sees in today’s labor struggles. In 2026, with tech companies consolidating power behind faceless AI models, it plays like a dystopian future that is already here.
Union Town premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival before North American premieres in Toronto and New York.
American Regional Cinema juror Peter Gilbert will discuss Kopple and his career after the screening. Gilbert was the director of photography for American Dream, and his long filmography as a director, producer, and cinematographer includes Hoop Dreams, recently named the fifth greatest documentary of all time by The Hollywood Reporter.
Barbara Kopple has dedicated her career to directing and producing powerful and emotionally affecting films about important social issues — including labor justice, freedom of speech, transgender acceptance, and anti-war advocacy — along with an array of musical documentaries. She is the two-time Academy Award-winning director of Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1990). In 1991, Harlan County, USA was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and designated as an American Film Classic. In the spring of 2026, Janus Films re-released both films, in 4K restorations, in theaters throughout the US.