Writing
Inspired by the Cadeby Main pit disaster, this is former miner and amateur director Charles Hanmer's innovative and audaciously ambitious feature debut. It's the tale of brassy Yorkshireman John Morgan's (played by Dewsbury's Beckett Bould) quest to convince an MP to finance a film about pit life. Threading stories about safety and technology with sketches of miners' hobbies, it's a holistic portrait of Barnsley pitmen.
This astonishingly ambitious amateur documentary examines the working lives of Barnsley's pitmen, whose muscle and machinery cut deep into the South Yorkshire Coalfield. It's an industrial process film at heart, following the miners' journey to work, descent at the pithead, labour underground, and the cut coal's journey by rail to Grimsby docks. Stylish and poetic, the scenes at the coalface are charged with elemental drama.
