The American labor documentary is, to a large degree, a form Barbara Kopple built, and for fifty years she has kept returning to the picket line to defend it. When she made Harlan County U.S.A. in the mid-1970s, she assumed almost no one would watch. “When I started making the film, I thought, ‘Oh, my parents will see it and their friends and maybe a museum will show it,’” she told Deadline. It won an Academy Award and rewrote the rules for how a camera could stand inside a strike rather than above it. Her new film, Union Town, argues that the fight has not ended so much as changed uniforms — the coal seam is now the delivery route, and the company town is now the gig economy.

The documentary follows New York City delivery workers — underpaid and frequently exploited employees of UPS, Amazon and the app-based courier services — as they try to organize against some of the most powerful corporations on earth. It completes a trilogy on American labor that Kopple began nearly half a century ago, carrying her embedded, long-take method into an industry that did not exist when she started.

That method is the argument. Harlan County U.S.A. and American Dream, her films about striking Kentucky coal miners and Hormel meatpackers, each won the Oscar for best documentary by refusing the safe distance of narration and living inside a dispute for years. Union Town extends that patience to workers whose managers are algorithms and whose picket line is a distribution hub, insisting that the questions of dignity and pay run continuously from the coalfield to the warehouse floor.

The timing gives the film a second edge. A documentary about how hard it still is to unionize arrives while Hollywood is litigating its own labor future, and while warehouse and delivery organizing has become one of the defining domestic stories of the decade. Kopple, at this point untouchable as an elder of the form, is effectively handing a younger generation of organizers the same megaphone she once handed to Appalachian miners.

Union Town — produced through Kopple’s Cabin Creek Films with Hannes Hosp and Peter Palandjian, and running 106 minutes — premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 9 and played Toronto before Kopple presented its U.S. premiere at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine on September 19.

Its most quietly radical image is also its simplest: a delivery worker with a fist raised beneath a hand-lettered ‘United, Strong Contract’ banner — a shot that could have come from Harlan County in 1974, except the truck idling behind him runs on next-day shipping.

Tags: documentary, festival-deal, labor, Barbara Kopple, Union Town