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Barbara Kopple completes her trilogy on labor rights with “Union Town.” Following screenings at Venice and Toronto, it’s now heading to Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, where Variety spoke to her about the film.
“Union Town” follows U.S. delivery and warehouse workers employed by UPS and Amazon, as well as app-based “deliveristas,” as they fight for a better future. “I guess I’ve always been drawn to stories about people fighting for dignity and fairness in their lives,” she says.
Kopple has won two Academy Awards for her docs “Harlan County U.S.A.,” about striking miners in Kentucky, and “American Dream,” about the 1985-1986 Hormel strike. The latter was shared with Arthur Cohn.
“When I made ‘Harlan County’ and then ‘American Dream,’ I spent many years with the coal miners and the meatpackers, and with their families. Those experiences shaped me as a filmmaker and as a person,” she adds.
“I learned so much about their courage, about what it takes for ordinary people to stand up to powerful institutions and how deeply these struggles affect entire communities. That’s what drew me back. We’re living through another important moment in labor history.”
After the pandemic, many delivery workers started to feel they were “disposable,” observes Kopple.
“They were risking their lives for others, and people didn’t understand that. They didn’t think about those who delivered their packages or worked in the warehouses. That’s one of the reasons for this film: so that people can see and feel who these workers are. And never, ever treat them as ‘disposable’ again.”
Ultimately, Kopple wanted to tell a “human story.”
“I like to dig deep and really get to know people. I really love and respect them. They are my heroes; they’re so courageous and passionate. But you don’t often get to know them,” she notes.
“Documentary filmmaking gives us a chance to spend time with people and their communities, see their lives up close and understand, in a way, the complexity of the world we’re living in.”
Sometimes, it doesn’t take long to establish trust with her protagonists.
“It doesn’t take long if they want to talk,” she says.
“I spend time with them so that audiences can feel what their experiences are like. I really think documentaries can create empathy.”
Some of the workers she’s interviewing are honest about their disappointment in the system, and also in the American Dream.
“[One of them], William, was a musician in his home country. I think he still plays, but this is as far as he can go right now until he’s able to become a naturalized citizen, which is very difficult under our current administration, if not impossible,” she says.
Many feel isolated. That is, until they start experiencing kinship with those who understand their situation only too well.
“There’s a scene when [longtime Teamster union organizer] Tony Rosario is with his children. He shows them that you can’t break a big stack of kindling, but you can break one piece of it. It’s his way of teaching them about solidarity and the importance of working together so that you’re never alone. That’s how you win.”
According to Kopple, documentary filmmakers already know this to be true.
“We’re not competitive with each other. We want each other to do well. If one of us succeeds, many of us will.”
She never wanted her film to be dark. After all, she’s not just depicting the struggles. In “Union Town,” Kopple also documents victories. In 2025, delivery platform DoorDash agreed to pay $17 million to settle claims that it used customer tips to subsidize the wages of its workers in New York.
“It’s actually very hopeful,” she says.
“Years later, people will be able to look back on this film and gain a better understanding of what happened. They can’t erase this history.”
“When we were in Venice, we brought in Amazon workers and the crowd stood up and cheered them on. Seeing them happy and excited, and seeing their worlds up on a screen, was emotional for all of us.”
Today, documentaries matter “more than ever.”
“They allow us to slow down and really listen to people whose voices are so often ignored. We’re living in a time when so much information is moving so quickly through social media and news cycles. It’s hard to understand the deeper human stories behind what’s happening. We want to make our films even more now that it’s so difficult.”
Produced by Cabin Creek Films, “Union Town” is being sold by Autlook Filmsales.
