This Is Not a Fiction 2026

Writing about Harlan County in the Village Voice twenty years ago, Michael Atkinson noted that “Kopple documents a 1973 Kentucky coal miners’ strike in what amounts to real time—there are no after-the-fact summaries, but a persistent present tense of murder, gun threats, crowd violence, poverty, corporate usury, and in the end, astonishing communal solidarity . . . In 1976, Kopple’s rather terrifying film rocked its minuscule audience and instantly became a cultural touchstone.”

In 2017, Melissa Anderson wrote in the Voice that Harlan County is “filled not just with the talk—aggrieved, mournful, funny, inflamed—of the miners and their families but with their songs. When bird-boned Florence Reece, nearing seventy-five at the time, sings her anthem ‘Which Side Are You On?’ to an auditorium of strikers, her voice is almost whisper-soft. The lyrics, though, are emphatic, urgent, and always timely, as is Harlan County USA.”

Ten years after that standoff in Kentucky, around 1500 workers walked out of the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, after the company introduced a pay cut. Labor activist Ray Rogers alerted Kopple, and as she told Bailey Pennick when American Dream screened at Sundance back in January, the community “welcomed me with open arms and treated me and my crew like family.”

In the Reagan era, though, “it was hard to gather funding for a film on unionism,” said Kopple. “There was a point in the middle of the infamous Minnesota winter where we had less than three hundred dollars in the bank . . . I couldn’t have done it without the support and sacrifice of my crew, and the strength of the people of Austin, Minnesota.”

The story that played out in front of Kopple’s cameras became far pricklier than the more streamlined, us-vs.-them narrative that drives Harlan County. Rogers convinced the local union to ditch the strategy advised by the national union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and as Kenneth Turan wrote in his 1992 review in the Los Angeles Times, “the company and its positions almost fade from view in favor of the agonizing and unprecedented battle that took place within the striking union itself, a fight without heroes or villains, only victims.” American Dream is “above all a thoroughly human story, a tale of euphoric highs and dark lows, of a battle over principle that chillingly turned brother against brother and reduced participants to fistfights, fury, and tears.”

For Murray Kempton, who wrote about American Dream in the New York Review of Books in 1992, Kopple’s “gift is to make us feel almost as kin to the few who quit as to the many who stuck it out. There is no cruelty quite like that which gives a man or woman no choice except the surrender of dignity for a job or of a job for dignity.” Kopple will be in New York on Friday, May 1, when the new restorations of Harlan County and American Dream open at the IFC Center.

A good number of screenings at this year’s festival are being cross-pollinated with the Cinematheque’s current retrospectives of work by Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice for Sacro GRA (2013) and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Fire at Sea (2016), and Peter Watkins, the director of The War Game (1966) and La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) who passed away last November. There are also ongoing tributes to Želimir Žilnik, a key figure in the Yugoslav Black Wave, and Caveh Zahedi, whose confessional and ultra-meta “audacity is so overwhelming as to be blinding,” as Christine Smallwood has written in the New York Times. “It takes some time to notice that underneath the humor and raw willingness to humiliate himself is a rigorous, brutally efficient editor, shaping every moment for impact.”

This Is Not a Fiction will also present three short films that Sergei Eisenstein shot in Mexico in the 1930s, launching the Cinematheque’s series of Eisenstein restorations running from Sunday through May 17. Ross McElwee will be in town on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss two films he’s made about his late son, Photographic Memory (2011) and Remake (2025), and the new restoration of a true documentary landmark, Sherman’s March (1985). This “may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen,” wrote Nick Davis in 2006. Sherman’s March is a “humorously hangdog sojourn through the American South: the director’s home territory, densely populated with relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are trying to atomize his creeping dejection and couple him off with one Dixieland bachelorette or another.”

Among the West Coast premieres is Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Everybody to Kenmure Street, a chronicle of the spontaneous—and surprisingly successful—protests following the arrests of two men of Indian Sikh background by immigration authorities in Glasgow in the summer of 2021. “In the age of ICE and MAGA, and the Trump-inspired nationalist movements in the UK,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “it’s an amazing story of a community triumph, showing how the nasty little habits of domineering policing can be countered by stubbornly British—and in this case, specifically Scottish—insistence on justice. It’s a morale-boosting film.”

Howard Brookner completed Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS in 1987, and Aaron Brookner, his nephew, spent a dozen years working on the restoration that premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival. Wilson’s grand project, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, a collaboration with Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars, would have been a twelve-hour opera staged in six cities in conjunction with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Howard Brookner’s film is “a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself,” wrote Lauren Wissot at the top of her interview with Aaron Brookner for Filmmaker in September. “Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access—an overused term when it comes to docs—to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world.” The new restoration will screen in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music series Robert Wilson and the Moving Image, opening on Saturday and running through April 23.

If all this sounds deadly serious, rest assured, there will be moments of levity at This Is Not a Fiction in the coming days. Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy will be on hand for a screening of Best in Show (2000), which the late Eddie Cockrell called a “barkingly funny” mockumentary “that does for those canine pageants what [Guest’s] 1996 Waiting for Guffman did for small-town theatrics.” Akiva Schaffer, who codirected Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) with Jorma Taccone, will celebrate the tenth anniversary of what Screen’s Tim Grierson has called a “superbly silly sendup of the modern musical landscape” that is “as thimble-deep as the throwaway hits it’s satirizing, but also just as lively.”

Jackass Number Two turns twenty this year, and Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine will be there for Saturday’s screening. “Debased, infantile, and reckless in the extreme,” wrote Nathan Lee in the New York Times, “this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated, and cathartic comedy in modern movies.”

This Is Not a Fiction 2026 will wrap with Los Lobos: Native Sons, Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti’s portrait of the band at fifty, featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt, Rubén Blades, Tom Waits, Dolores Huerta, Danny Elfman, Jackson Browne, Cheech Marin, Edward James Olmos, Peter Frampton, and George Lopez. And Los Lobos will tie it all up with a live acoustic set.