Some Will Forget

Ruth Grimberg's documentary explores a small community in the North of England, a town dependent on its neighbouring colliery, Hatfield, left struggling with a litany of losses. One of its central acts is a march commemorating the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike, an event whose psychic and social wounds cut the landscape as deeply as any open cast workings would. In archive footage (and frequent visits - it's clear this represents a long period of work) we see the continued decline of the town, its young men not going to the pit, the closure of the mine, the decommissioning of the headworks. That last possesses more than a little symbolic weight - one cut, and that which made everything work disappears almost instantly from view. A skeleton remains, but it is unclear if it will stay standing; what once supported lives across the region is a bureaucratic campaign away from standing as a tribute to those who died below.

There are some powerful moments - an idle suburban idyll punctuated by a single bonfire's smoke, the earnest speechifying of those who still hope, the hints at other losses, unseen consequences of the end of an industry. Despite these, however, the film feels unstructured - nonetheless affecting, but akin to a collage. Perhaps the best analogy is the banners held by the marching miners, each significant, moving, but separate, broadly in the same direction but unified more by progress and theme than anything else. Though possessed of a sense of purpose now more defined by an absence than anything else. The mine is gone. Stories remain.