“I Realized This Was a Film Not Necessarily About Things Seen…But Things Felt”: Elaine McMillion Sheldon on King Coal

Like many Filmmaker readers, I first encountered the work of Elaine McMillion Sheldon a decade ago, when the West Virginia native landed on our annual 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2013. She’d just completed Hollow, which began as a documentary about her home state’s struggling McDowell County, and ultimately transformed into a sprawling interactive project; and per Randy Astle’s profile, “a community portrait that includes about three hours of video — including a lot shot by members of the community — audio recordings, text, photographs and user-generated material via Instagram.” Sheldon then popped back onto my radar two years later when I covered FilmGate 2015 down in Miami, where the multidisciplinary artist was working on another interactive piece (and doc feature) about the Sunshine State’s most colorful resident predator (pre-Trump), the insatiable and destructively invasive lion fish. Since then of course, Sheldon’s become much wider known as the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker behind Netflix docs Heroin(e) and Recovery Boys, both of which drew her back once again to her West Virginia roots. And now fans old and new can look forward to the director’s latest (Sundance-selected) feature King Coal, a Central Appalachia-set tour de force that uses both archival imagery and a fictional narration to explore the complicated legacy of living in a once thriving, now dying, fossil fuel monarchy; ruled capriciously by a sedimentary rock determining the fates of generations from deep underground. Filmmaker caught up with the artistic coal miner’s daughter (and granddaughter and great granddaughter) just prior to King Coal’s August 11th theatrical premiere at NYC’s DCTV Theater (with a national rollout to follow).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.