Oscar Winner Barbara Kopple On ‘Union Town,’ Her Third Towering Film On American Labor – Camden Film Festival

Fifty years ago, a young director named Barbara Kopple came out with her first film, a documentary she thought would be little seen.

“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 recalls.

That film was Harlan County U.S.A., about a long running strike at a coal mine in southeast Kentucky, and it was immediately hailed as brilliant, earning Kopple an Academy Award. She would earn a second Oscar for her 1991 documentary American Dream, about a strike at a Hormel Foods plant in Minnesota.

Kopple has made many other documentaries in intervening years – on actor Gregory Peck, singer Sharon Jones, and country band the Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks), among others. But she returns to the theme for which she is best known – working people in America — in her new documentary Union Town. It just held its U.S. premiere at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine after bowing at the Venice Film Festival earlier in September.

Union Town follows the battle for better wages and working conditions on three fronts in New York City — at UPS, at Amazon, and among “deliveristas” – that is, people who work for apps like DoorDash making food runs for customers.

“I think that they [labor organizers] have a big fight on their hands, but I think that they’re road warriors and I feel an awful lot of hope,” Kopple tells Deadline in an interview at the Camden Opera House, where Union Town screened. “Each time they win something, it’s glorious. It’s wonderful. And they get a little closer and a little closer. And what else can you do? You have to keep fighting… Looking at the people that they work with who can hardly make a living or people who die in the plants because there’s no air conditioning [in summer] or no heat in the winter, it’s just a very human thing to do, so you can’t stop.”

In the past four decades, union participation in America has dropped by about half. “[But] they’re still there. They’re still there,” Kopple says of unions. “And if you don’t have them, you don’t have anything.”

She points to Antonio Rosario, a veteran of a 1997 strike at UPS who serves as the Teamsters lead union organizer for Amazon workers in the northeast. At one moment in the film, Rosario is with his young sons at the dinner table and holds a bundle of sticks in his hands to illustrate the importance of worker solidarity.

“Tony is trying to show them the difference that if you have a lot of people together, it takes too much to break it,” Kopple explains. “And if you just have one stick, you can break it. And that’s what it is. It’s people who have your back. It’s people who will help you and it gives you a sense of strength that you can change.”

Of the three groups seen in the documentary, deliveristas face the worst conditions and pay – they work year-round in every kind of weather, driving their bikes through snow in winter, for instance. Kopple documents the case of Victor Hidalgo, a 24-year-old man who was working for a pharmacy delivery company in 2024 when a New York Fire Department vehicle hit his bicycle, killing him. At a Q&A following the U.S. premiere, Kopple said Hidalgo’s aunt urged her to put him in the documentary.

“She said, ‘I don’t want anyone to ever forget Victor,’” Kopple recounted. “’Please come and film the funeral. Please come and let people know that these things really happen.’”

Deliveristas rely on tips as a major source of income, but customers often don’t give them much (one deliverista recalls a person opening his hand to deposit a tip and placing in his palm a piece of candy). What’s worse, the tips they receive through the app may not go to them; in 2025 DoorDash reached a nearly $17 million settlement in New York after being accused of effectively taking workers’ tips. (Per the New York Attorney General’s office, “Customers were misled into believing their tips would directly benefit Dashers. Instead, DoorDash would keep the tips meant for Dashers and take it out of their guaranteed pay. DoorDash would guarantee pay to a delivery worker, and then only actually pay them whatever the tip did not cover.”).

“What it does if people get to see this film is maybe they’ll give big tips. Maybe they’ll talk to the people who deliver or at least understand them,” Kopple says. “Ever since UPS got their contract, every time I see a UPS truck, I stop and I talk to the driver and I say, ‘So how’s your contract? How’s work?’ And they’re looking at me like, ‘Who’s this crazy person?’ But it’s wonderful to do it… [It shows] somebody cares. Somebody’s out there who cares about them. They’re not invisible.”

Autlook is handling worldwide film sales for Union Town. The 2024 documentary Union, about the successful effort to organize workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island, NY, struggled to find U.S. distribution (it was clear Prime Video wouldn’t touch it). That film by Stephen Maing and Brett Story is now streaming through Criterion.

Kopple says it’s “too soon to tell” about potential distribution of Union Town. “This was the third time the film has ever shown, and I had just finished it maybe two weeks before Venice. So, it’s totally at the beginning. I mean, I hope it gets great distribution and gets shown far and wide.”