Thursday Events

Thursday, September 18

Pre-Film Performance by Mary Hott

Mary Hott delivers a soulful Americana song cycle inspired by recently discovered first-person accounts of life deep in West Virginia’s coalfields, a life dominated by the systemic oppression that kept miners and their wives under the thumb of coal companies and their henchmen. The album calls for a full reckoning to bring an end to the generational trauma that continues today.

Film Festival

7PM - Palace Theatre, 31 E. Main St., Frostburg

A lyrical tapestry of a place and people, KING COAL meditates on the complex history and future of the coal industry, the communities it has shaped, and the myths it has created. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon reshapes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking in a spectacularly beautiful and deeply moving immersion into Central Appalachia where coal is not just a resource, but a way of life, imagining the ways a community can re-envision itself.

While deeply situated in the coalfields, the film transcends time and place, emphasizing the ways in which all are connected through an immersive mosaic of belonging, ritual, and imagination. Emerging from the long shadows of the coal mines, KING COAL untangles the pain from the beauty, and illuminates the innately human capacity for change.

“The film is both a cumulative eulogy for a way of life and an examination of the climate crisis through witnessing the charred remains of these rural landscapes... [In] this melancholic, thoughtfully attuned cinematic essay, no mountain is more important than the people who are still confined to the claustrophobic tunnels of the past.”-The New York Times

Post-Film Virtual Discussion with Producer

Elaine McMillion Sheldon (Director/Producer/Co-Editor) is an Academy Award-nominated, and Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker. Sheldon is the director of two Netflix Original Documentaries - HEROIN(E) and RECOVERY BOYS- that explore America's opioid crisis. She has been named a Creative Capital Awardee, Guggenheim Fellow, a USA Fellow by United States Artists, and one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film,” by Filmmaker Magazine. Her latest film, KING COAL, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. McMillion Sheldon was raised in West Virginia and lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.