Movies: Appalshop

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is a first person documentary about the extraordinary life of this American civil rights leader. Braden was hailed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail as a white southerner whose rejecti...

Appalshop’s first dramatic film, In Ya Blood is the story of a prototypical young man from Appalachia in the summer after his senior year in high school. Randy, the protagonist, must make the difficult decision faced by many Appalachian youth‑‑whethe...

For Nixon's first public appearance since resigning the presidency, Richard Nixon chose the small mountain community of Leslie County, Kentucky. Priceless footage of Nixon's 1978 visit introduces this incisive and sometimes hilarious look at the engi...

The experience of artmaking in Appalachia is a complex one. An Appalachian identity often creates a distinctive and strong relationship between person and homeplace, but artists are told they need to leave the region in order to learn and innovate. B...

1974 documentary about Clarence Frederick "Catfish" Gray a herbalist and folk doctor in West Virginia....

Ray Hicks is a mountain farmer from Beech Mountain, North Carolina, with a genius for telling traditional folktales that have been passed down in his family for generations. This film shows Ray working on his farm, gathering herbs in the woods, and d...

Coal Bucket Outlaw is a documentary that asks Americans to look at where our energy comes from at a time when coal still produced over half of our nation's electricity, and reveals the human and environmental price we pay for our national addiction t...

There is a constant tension between the forces of an ever-changing economy and the need to have stable communities. As technologies change, workers can lose their jobs and whole communities can be capsized. Beyond Measure looks at thousands of coal m...

John Jacob Niles is a portrait of the adding machine repairman who came to Eastern Kentucky in 1909, “heard the songs [his] father sang,” and became a much-noted “arranger, expander, collector, recorder, and performer” of traditional Appalachian ball...

In this small town “epic,” the people of Whitesburg, KY speak directly to the camera about unemployment, student unrest, and the Vietnam War. The down-home candor of the exchanges presents a revolutionary alternative to the voice-over narration then ...