Appalshop Channel

On Feb. 26, 1972, a coal-waste dam at the head of a crowded West Virginia hollow burst. A wall of sludge, debris and water tore through the valley below, leaving in its wake 125 dead and 4,000 homeless. The Pittston Company, owners of the dam, maintained that the disaster was “an act of God.” In response Appalshop filmmaker Mimi Pickering produced "The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man," which powerfully portrays the impact of the disaster. Ten years later she returned to the creek to document the continuing disaster in “Buffalo Creek Revisited,” excerpted here.

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Up the Ridge offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts and explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict.

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Kentucky youth are speaking up for Universal Broadband. Will you join them?

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Director Tom Hansell remixes old educational films with the current controversy surrounding a coal fired power plant in the Appalachian coalfields to reveal the impact of our national energy policy on rural communities that produce the nation's power.

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The death of a Canadian filmmaker, shot and killed by a local resident in Appalachia at the height of America’s War on Poverty, serves as a departure point for documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Barret to explore issues of media representation and to reflect on the complex intersection of communities, culture, and cameras. (60 min., copyright 2000, Appalshop, Inc.)

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"As someone who lives in the community I document, what can I learn from this story now that I have stood on both sides of the camera?"

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"I don't see, with the other people who came in, how they could have done anything else. I don't know what could have been done to show the problem. I mean you can talk about it, but it doesn't really come through until you actually see it."

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"On the witness stand the surviving filmmakers managed to avoid admitting to Ison's lawyers that it was the appalling poverty of his tenants that had interested them."

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