I joined the podcast Utopias with Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan to talk about my film King Coal. I explained my approach to documentary filmmaking and the tension between loyalty and truth in my community of Central Appalachia. We also discussed the work of repair that can lead to a brighter future.
Question: I feel like everything would look and sound better on-screen if I could just learn to slow down, but when I’m on location I’m always worried I’m taking too much time to set up, get my shots, etc. Any advice on taking up space, taking your time, etc.?
Answer: I’m uncomfortably familiar with the nagging feeling that I’m taking up too much time or space while on location. You might worry that your participants are getting impatient, that you’re slowing down the shoot, or that you’re taking too long to get set up. But here’s the truth: quality storytelling requires time, patience, and presence.
The best documentaries result from allowing life to unfold in front of the camera, which takes more time than most people realize. Learning how to balance your needs as a filmmaker with respect for your participants’ time is crucial, but you should never rush the process at the expense of the story.
I also want to note that there tend to be two extremes here. There are people who (like the person asking the question) are afraid to take up any space, and those who take up too much space. Neither approach is helpful. We are seeking a balance between respect for the participants’ time, and a respect for their/your story. You are there, after all, to do a job. You are not there to take, extract, or “capture” something in a greedy way. Developing your filmmaking maturity is key to finding the balancing act of slowing down while being respectful.
In the Shadow of King Coal
While the coal industry is in terminal decline, it still shapes the culture of central Appalachia.
The Bitter Southerner’s recent all-women issue, shares essays, stories, poetry, illustrations, and photography about what it’s like to live right now as women. They reached out to me to be part of a roundup of women in media weighing in with a quick answer to the question: WHAT WOULD BE THE TITLE OF YOUR THEORETICAL BOOK ABOUT BEING A WOMAN IN 2024?
My response: QUIET POWER
If anyone would actually like me to write that book…let’s do it!
Check out all the great responses in the latest issue of BS and sneak peeks on their instagram
I am so grateful for the support of the Tennessee Arts Commission who has awarded me with an Individual Artist Fellowship in Film. It’s a huge honor to be recognized among the state’s great makers. Learn more here.
I’m so excited to announce that I am writing a book with West Virginia University Press!
“We’re pleased to announce that we’ve signed up Academy Award-nominated, Peabody-winning, and two-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon to write a book for us! This work, a reflection on her career as a documentary filmmaker, will blend personal essays with practical knowledge and is inspired by the queries that the director of King Coal receives from aspiring filmmakers. ”
…some random quotes from recent readings
"Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only the truth. You get the facts from the outside. The truth you get from inside."
"For an artist, there are just two ways to go: to push toward the limit of your capacity, or to sit back and emit garbage."
-"The Language of the Night" by Ursula le Guin
"Raymond Gastil has looked at Cultural Regions of the United States and suggested, 'The greatest self-confidence and loyalty are inspired in those who see what they do locally in universal terms.'
Of course. Such a viewpoint is difficult to achieve if you have been brought to believe, either explicitly or by the power of suggestion, that the place where you live is inferior, out of the mainstream. How to be neither defensive nor offensive about the region where we live?
Gastil spoke to this dilemma. 'As long as artists or businessmen or professors in the regional centers of the country see success as achievable only outside their region, there will be no great regional cultures. On the other hand, as long as those who remain in the 'boondocks' see their task as the glorification of whatever characteristics their regions happen to possess, they will build little that is enduring. The Iranian poet Hafez was asked many times to leave Shiraz for India, where the big money was in the fifteenth-century Islamic world; but he stayed behind, where his life was. He has come down to us as a model creator of sheer beauty in poetry, while the poets who went to India are forgotten. Perhaps the greatest creativity comes from remaining at a creative distance from both great population centers and local surroundings and building a universe of one's own.'
Wherever your universe may be it will be unworthy if it is ignorant or indifferent or contemptuous of other places."
-"Explorations" by Wilma Dykeman
"In his essay 'Art as Device,' the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky argues that we perpetually grow habituated to everything around us— 'Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, ones wife, and the fear of war.' And that the job of art is to make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit. The way art does this is through a process he calls остранение, transliterated as 'ostranenie' and translated as 'defamiliarization' or, neologistically, as 'enstrangement' (i.e., enchantment + estrangement). 'Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life,' he writes, 'It exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.'"
"One of the advantages to being a novelist is removing oneself from the chatter of the fray and trying to get a read and a historical context on what’s happening in one’s own time. I see that as a responsibility both artistic and ethical."
-Rachel Kushner
"Right now I’m writing something, and people are asking, 'Is it fiction or is it real?' I was like: 'Well, I’m really not sure where that line goes.' And I’m really not. And, being an artist is what? Real or fantasy or…? Even when I’ve tried to work in the real world, it seems more deeply fantastical than anything I could make up. The fact that it happened, does it make it less fictional than if it never happened?"
- Laurie Anderson
"There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the 'end of history.' Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of "non-time" that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé's non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a 'crisis of over-availability' that, in effect, signifies the 'loss of loss itself': nothing dies any more, everything 'comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective' like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher). Hauntology is not just a symptom of the times, though: it is itself haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost futures. 'So what would it mean, then, to look for the future's remnants?'"
- The Guardian
This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences extended invitations to 487 artists and executives who have distinguished themselves by their contributions to motion pictures. And I’m so excited and honored to announce I have been invited to join the Academy's Documentary Branch
As someone who has paved a non-traditional career path, living and working as a filmmaker in the U.S. South and Appalachia, I am excited to learn from others, and share the obstacles we face as filmmakers outside the tight-knit circles of our industry in New York City and Los Angeles. I look forward to supporting my colleagues as they make work that challenges our ideas — both creatively and ethically — of nonfiction art. Being part of The Academy at this exciting yet precarious time in our field is a huge honor and I look forward to discussions about our evolving role as nonfiction artists in society. As I continue down my path, I hope to lift up new artists and voices so that they also feel empowered to tell stories from their own communities.
I am so excited to have been granted a two week artist residency at Virginia College of Creative Arts this fall. It will be such a luxury and privilege to have two weeks set aside for my personal projects.
I am SO PROUD of KING COAL’s cinematographer, and my dear husband, Curren Sheldon for his huge award by the American Society of Cinematographers.
a special thanks to our wonderful publicists at MPRM for helping get the word out about KING COAL
To practice humanitarian patience in representing a chronically misunderstood culture is commendable in its own right, but to go beyond journalistic objectivity and strive to become a proud and personable work of art? That might just be something new altogether.
The Best Documentaries of 2023
The Film Stage
The Best Documentaries of 2023 (So Far)
Esquire
Melancholic, thoughtfully attuned cinematic essay
The New York Times (Critic’s Pick)
Breathtaking
Wall Street Journal
Eloquently layered piece of creative nonfiction
Film Matters Magazine
Lush in presentation and sober in meaning, the film is an artistic triumph.
Film Festival Today
A highly expressive, poetic film; to call it a documentary feels like something of a misdirection
Film Obsessive
Transcends mere documentation, evolving into cinematic art.
Overly Honest Movie Reviews
A poignant documentary finds hope for the future
New Scientist
A lyrical tribute
RogerEbert.com
A genuine piece of cinematic art at the highest level
Unseen Films
King Coal is a rare work of art that manages to look forward precisely by looking backward, putting boundaries around the past only to make it part of the future.
Film Inquiry
A glimpse into a world most of us don’t have a lot of insight into.
Film Threat
King Coal is an odyssey—an epic poem in the form of a film.
Alliance of Women Film Journalists
The Most Anticipated Docs of 2023
Esquire
King Coal is not merely a history; it is a ghost story, an exercise in remembrance, and a cinematic archive.
Film Daze
This film deserves to become a centerpiece of cultural discussion for multiple generations to come.
Geek Vibes Nation
Illuminating, Insightful Cine-Essay.
Screen Anarchy
Thanks to this unique vision that goes beyond the simple headlines or prejudices about the area, Sheldon’s poetic documentary is both welcoming and wonderful.
POV Magazine
Sheldon has a style of her own – impressionistic, atmospheric, searching.
Crooked Marquee
It really does feel as if she’s looking directly into the soul of the community for answers, with Curren Sheldon’s arresting cinematography illuminating the resilience of those who have stuck around and unlocking the wonder still in the air that makes it feel that there’s something still untapped in the region that’s been left for dead.
Moveable Fest
An atmospheric, evocative elegy for Central Appalachia. Sheldon envisions a future built on the sturdy foundation of King Coal’s past, but one that soars beyond its crushing darkness.
The Playlist
Appalachia Rises in Poetic, Personal Doc
Indie Wire
Reveals a resilience that’s hard to shake
Next Best Picture
A startling piece of anthropology
Paste Magazine
This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
An ambisonic recording device built by sound recordist, Billy Wirasnik.
Our sound mix team at Signature Post was led by Alexandra Fehrman (CODA, 2021; Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022) who supervised the incredible team: re-recording mixer, Tim Hoogenakker; sound designer, Benjamin L. Cook; dialogue editor, Christina Chuyue Wen; and foley services by Post Creations. The sound mix hinged on emphasizing the lush environments captured by our production sound mixer, Billy Wirasnik, who recorded an incredible library of ambisonic nature recordings —birds, crickets, owls, thunder, wind, rain, rivers, creeks, forests— over the course of several years of production. We also worked with breath artist Shodekeh Talifero, who with his own body and voice made the sound of thunder, ocean waves, crickets, wind, whistles, and many other sounds. We recorded his session in a moss-floored, dense forest in the Allegheny Mountains (hats off to associate producer, Clara Haizlett, for finding this perfect outdoor sound studio). His sound art and human breath is used throughout the film as transitions and as a motif to explore the new life the coalfields are embarking upon. Sound, in addition to music, plays a key role in the film’s magical realism.
This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
Bobak Lotfipour talks about his work on King Coal at San Francisco Film Festival.
Composer Bobak Lotfipour and I worked together to dream up a rich, challenging musical landscape that represented both the beauty and pain of the region largely through over 20 percussive instruments: drums, bells, crystal bowls, and playing non-traditional objects, such as sheets of metal. We sought to create two worlds for the music. The coal world being machine-driven, electric, with bass and darkness. The film in these moments has deep rumbles of uncertainty; the oppression that living in a boom-and-bust economy creates. In the non-coal scenes our palette was less mechanical; more human, animal, and textured. These natural sounds, including human whistles, were still mysterious and not too sweet. We sought a balance between the images and sound, imbuing calm visuals with an eeriness and mystery in the music. The musical landscape reflects the film’s focus on a community on the brink of change, with all its uncertainty and all the fears and joys.
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This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
This is a film that blends vérité scenes with imagined scenes where real people, non-actors, were asked to just go about life in front of the cameras. But the scene itself, in the case of the funeral as pictured above, would not have existed without the framework of the film. Other scenes were purely natural, with us filming live events but with two young girls —dancers with coal family connections that we cast— just being kids in the moment. It was a constant recalibration and humbling experience to dream big, fail massively, and then get back up the next day and try again. This type of filmmaking required everyone on our team to think on their toes about how to best capture the magic of real life and always ask how this might work in our overall narrative.
King Coal is whole-heartedly a product of taking creative risks. We filmed this over three years and we were led from shoot to shoot based on reactions and creative impulses of our team and Appalachians we filmed with. Some ideas for shots and scenes came to me as a single image from my imagination, or a memory from childhood that I wanted to recreate. Others were spontaneous ideas that popped into our minds while being immersed in the environments we filmed in. The entire act of filmmaking and creating this film was a call and response between our team and the land and people we were filming. Much credit goes to our small, but mighty, on-the-ground producing team – Diane Becker, Shane Boris, Molly Born, Clara Haizlett, Curren Sheldon, and Elijah Stevens – who took my craziest ideas for scenes like king coal’s funeral, and made them a reality.
King Coal was reviewed today in The New York Times where it received a Critics’ Pick!
You can stream the film on Amazon Prime!
This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
I began filming King Coal in 2019, but when COVID-19 kept us at home, I had time to start thinking more about the goals of this film as a piece of cinema, not just from a traditional documentary impact point of view. I sought out films that helped me break open the ways I had been telling stories. Above are some images from films that inspired my thinking behind King Coal. These are films that explore the myths of places, the dreams of children, hauntings and ghosts stories, dance and movement, surreal sound design, use voice-over narration as a guide, feature raw vérité moments, rely on mosaic structures, center children and/or women, employ wardrobe and production design as a form of storytelling, explore Afrofuturism and magical realism, use editing to create new worlds with a single cut, and where metaphors and symbolism are at the center of plot. There are many more films to be listed (“Badlands” by Terrence Malick also comes to mind when writing the voice over narration), but it felt like a very important part of my process to broaden my reference points outside of documentaries. I aimed to tell a story that was felt, but not always seen. That required me to employ cinematic tools I had never used before in vérité filmmaking.
Read Elaine’s full list of films that inspired thinking in King Coal here.
This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
The film is a documentary that blends fictional and fable storytelling elements to tell a different story of coal. One way it does this is by centering the story on two West Virginia girls, Lanie Marsh and Gabby Wilson, who were cast for the roles at local dance studios. Some of the scenes they are featured in are real-life moments, like the West Virginia Coal Festival in Madison, W.Va. In those scenes, Lanie and Gabby were placed there to show what it’s like to be a kid, but the things they say and do in them are completely unscripted and unprompted. Other scenes, such as those featuring the girls dancing in front of coal piles or in surreal landscapes, were set up for the purposes of the film. But never were Lanie and Gabby given a script to read; they were asked to be themselves in every scene.
This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
CAPTION: Director of photography, Curren Sheldon, and director, Elaine McMillion Sheldon, with their 3-month old baby while filming King Coal in Thurmond, West Virginia.
The writing process first began before filming started. I found myself drawn to a form of creative nonfiction that blended personal story with folklore. As we began to film King Coal the writing evolved and became a reaction to the footage itself. Some of the writing digs beneath the surface of what is being seen, like a coal dust 5K, to illuminate the psychology of coal as a cultural touchstone. My goal was to tell the truth, but without complete condemnation. Towards the end of the film the narration shifts from “I” and “me” to “we” and “us.” This collective sense of identity carries through to other aspects of the film. The script poses more questions than answers, something contributing writer and editor, Iva Radivojević, encouraged.
In the middle of production, I gave birth to my first child. Having a child really put into perspective the story I needed to voice through this film. I asked myself what I wanted to communicate about the history of Appalachia and the fading role of coal to the child I was bringing into the modern world. It became very important that this film didn’t just replace the negative ideas of Appalachia with beautiful ones, but instead allows the pain and strength to swirl around in order to allow for a slow absorption of contradictions, irony, and imagination. The process of making this film required a level of vulnerability and personal excavation that was challenging, but speaking to the next generation gave me courage. My initial resistance to being the narrator faded away as the team and I recognized that it was my voice that was most true to the writing, which is not always first-person, but always personal. Hats off to my contributing writers, Shane Boris, Logan Hill, Iva Radivojević, and Heather Hannah, who read countless drafts and edited for clarity, rhythm, and pacing.