ABSTRACT
The communities that were under investigation were settled coal-mining villages whose inhabitants worked in deep coal mines, but there are many other kinds of mining whose workers do not live in conventional mining camps, towns or villages. The isolation of coal communities undoubtedly led to their highly developed sense of community and subtle sense of being different from the rest of society. The miners are refusing to work a new seam of coal because they believe, on the evidence of the father of the hero of the film, that extant plans show it to be unsafe. The Chinese film director Wang Bing also looked at the curious world of artisanal coal in his 2009 movie, Coal Money. In 2016, while running for the presidency of the United States, Hillary Clinton published a ‘Plan for Revitalizing Coal Communities’.
