Half a century after its release, Harlan County USA (1976) still lands with the force of something happening in the present tense. The documentary is full of scenes that have become part of the language of labor in the United States: miners’ wives holding the picket line at dawn, a woman pulling a gun from her bra in preparation to face down company violence, picketers singing “Which Side Are You On?” as trucks try to break through their line. It is one of the most influential labor documentaries ever made in the United States — not simply a record of a 1973 coal strike in Eastern Kentucky but a way of seeing what struggle looks like from the inside.

Its follow-up, American Dream (1990), is no less gripping. Covering the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota, the film turns from a fight against a company to a conflict that runs through the labor movement itself, capturing a moment when concessions, plant closures, and internal divisions reshaped what union power could look like. Together the films map a shift in American industry from the coalfields to the meatpacking line, and the pressures that accompanied it, while holding on to the texture of daily life inside those fights: on picket lines, in union halls, and in the relationships that hold a strike together or pull it apart.

Both films are now returning to theaters through a rerelease by Janus Films, arriving at a moment when labor has reentered public view, even as many of the dynamics they depict remain intact. The films were directed by Barbara Kopple, who won Academy Awards for both and has spent decades documenting political struggle across a wide range of subjects. But these two works remain central in part because of how they were made. Kopple embedded herself with the people she was filming for long stretches of time, without knowing how the story would end. The result is a form of documentary that does not tell the viewer what to think so much as place them within unfolding events, allowing them to make sense of competing strategies, loyalties, and consequences as they emerge.