Barbara Kopple on How Documentaries Have Changed Since She Won Her First Oscar and the Enduring Appeal of True Stories
Addie Morfoot Contributor In Barbara Kopple’s 40-plus year career as one of America’s greatest documentary directors, she has won Academy Awards for the seminal 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” a portrait of a Kentucky coal mining town in crisis, and for “American Dream,” a 1990 examination of a meatpackers’ strike at a Hormel plant in Austin, Minn. A pioneer of cinema vérité that got her start with the Maysles brothers (directors of “Gimme Shelter” and “Grey Gardens”), she was most recently nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award for “Desert One,” a doc about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Kopple will be a keynote speaker at Variety and Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit on Thursday.