Award-Winning Filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon on Heroin(e), Recovery Boys, and what comes next.
Hard reality, humanity, and hope. They underpin every project of the documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, who grew up in the coal-mining town of Logan, West Virginia. Her father was a coal miner, and until earlier this year, her brother was too.
Her work acknowledges the history of coal in Appalachia, the tension of the push and pull between legacy and benefits, employment and damage to people, communities, and land. Sheldon has numerous awards under her belt, and her deft hand and honesty win plaudits from the industry, critics, and people who live what she describes.
Why is she still drawn to Appalachia? “In some ways, it’s like stories kind of find me. I don’t go out looking for them,” she says. Trending topics don’t call to her. “Certainly I’ve made films about the opioid crisis [2017’s Heroin(e) and 2018’s Recovery Boys], and that is a very newsworthy topic, but we tried to do it in a way that was more about the humans and the resilience than taking down a singular bad guy or chasing headlines.”
“One of the great things about documentaries is that they have to exist within communities, and the best people oftentimes, not always, to tell the story are the people closest to that community.”
Viewers relate to the honesty in Sheldon’s films, which is a result of the trust she builds with the communities she profiles. She’s not out to score cheap political points—she has lived among them, she understands. “I think all the stories I’ve done about this place are pretty universal. They are just the stories that speak the loudest to me,” Sheldon explains. “One of the great things about documentaries is that they have to exist within communities, and the best people oftentimes, not always, to tell the story are the people closest to that community.”
In 2013, she released Hollow, an interactive online documentary that was ahead of its time in design and approach—it looks at the future of rural America through the eyes and voices of West Virginians. Sheldon gave local people cameras to record parts of their lives that reflected who they were and the essence of their community. The film received a Peabody award and a News & Documentary Emmy nomination.
Of all her work, though, 2023’s King Coal is the most stunning—and the most difficult to describe. The trailer calls it a “lyrical tapestry of a place and people,” and it is that and more. Sheldon shows the beauty of the region and its culture, from music to dance to funeral traditions. We see coal pageants, coal-sponsored high school football teams, coal everything. The film follows two young girls growing up in a coal town, carefree, just being kids. Sheldon weaves past, present, and future together. (She says women were often editors in the early documentary industry: “Editing was seen as like a form of sewing or quilt making, which I just love as a metaphor, because in many ways, when we were editing King Coal it did feel like a patchwork—a quilt more than a linear experience.”)
“I tried to tell [King Coal] the way stories had been told to me growing up here,” Sheldon says. “I wanted it to resemble the fables and the myths and all the feelings of that, so in many ways it communicates a language that was taught to me here.”
Sheldon talks of how people make assumptions about the people of Appalachia and were concerned that King Coal would be too “arty” for them to appreciate. Wrong. “Yes, it’s creative, and yes, it’s artful in its way. But people in Appalachia know a ghost story, right? They can take the leap of going from a story about a person to a place,” she says. “People here actually get it, because it’s saying things we all feel but don’t really know how to put words to oftentimes. So my brother really got the film. And my mom really got the film, and my dad—after three times of watching it—got the film, because he had a layer of resistance to wanting to get it.”
Talking to Sheldon, you get the sense that earning her dad’s support for King Coal meant as much to her as the documentary being an official selection for the Sundance Film Festival and a New York Times Critic’s Pick, among garnering other honors. “He really appreciated it and recommended it to lots of people he worked with in the coal mines and in the coal industry, who maybe didn’t necessarily get it the way he did, which was really sweet to see,” she says.
Sheldon wrote and narrates the film. She resisted the latter role at first, but the work’s whimsy and abstractness made it important to have a narrator to guide audiences. “It was scary, because I didn’t know how people would perceive me, particularly in my family or in the coalfields, communicating some things that are rather tense to communicate.
“The line we were always looking to balance with King Coal was to challenge the audience and ask questions that need to be asked, but also comfort them in moments and remind them that this has not been a totally horrible experience. It’s not a great experience and it’s not a horrible experience. It’s both, right?”
Coal culture and history are so pervasive in Appalachia that “if you say anything negative, or even show a polluted creek, it is ‘anti-coal,’” Sheldon says. “In this region, it’s this all-or-nothing mentality. And that’s why there are so many references about the ‘king’ and sort of this betrayal. It’s so black and white. And that’s the unfair paradox that keeps people silent.”
“There’s something about women, who—in my life, at least—are able to see the openings, the cracks, and know when to start looking in and start asking those questions.”
She does have hope for Appalachia’s future, though, and agrees that women are key, through their sharing of both stories and history, as well as the region’s dreams. “There’s something about women, who—in my life, at least—are able to see the openings, the cracks, and know when to start looking in and start asking those questions.”
Sheldon goes on to explain that “the desired energy of King Coal was to gently look into those cracks and see what was there. And I think that’s a kind of feminine urge, because this has been painted as such a masculine story with the coal miner—the feminine presence in the coalfields is less heard and seen. It’s keeping things afloat, pushing for things, whether it’s justice or to clean up the creek. Most of the efforts that I remember growing up were led by women.”
And the girls who are the thread of life running through King Coal embody that hope and the dreams. “You have these two girls who are asking questions about what it means to be in this place today, whether they want to stay or leave, but they also are just kids.” Sheldon says we should see them as a “reminder that there’s a future in this region—whether we invest in that future or not is up to us.”
Children are flexible thinkers, she adds: “They’re more fluid, in the sense that they can imagine this space being new or different. They can jump to learn history and also think about the future. And their dreams are just as relevant as their reality. All those things made these two girls really inspiring to me, you know—that they still had these big dreams but could be in this place and love it.”
Stories and images have resonated with Sheldon from an early age. “I’ve always learned visually… felt the most emotionally connected to stories that I actually heard or saw before reading,” she says. “Actually, I most admire writing—I think it’s the highest form of storytelling, even though cinema uses all the senses. I wanted to be a writer, but I just felt always this tension that I could never quite put into words the same things I could capture [on film].”
Sheldon is aware of navigating changes in her craft. “It’s weird writing or making films or anything today, because there’s this idea now of ‘second screen viewing’—when people watch your films, they’re also looking at their phone, so your film is now their second screen,” she explains. “That’s why you see so many shows and films serving the least common denominator in terms of reminding you of where they are in the story, and it’s just really redundant.”
AI is also a concern, although she does see some benefits for filmmakers: “With a click of a button, something that would cost you $10,000 is now a tool available to you,” she says. “So in many ways it makes things more accessible for more people. But there’s so many jobs and expertise being lost in that process.”
“If we can figure out how AI could help creatives in their creative pursuit without stealing everything from creativity, then it won’t be such a scary thing.”
She’s concerned about AI’s effect on creativity and art too. “I feel like as we use AI and technology and we’re trying to make it more human, we in some ways are becoming more machine-like,” Sheldon says. “If we can figure out how AI could help creatives in their creative pursuit without stealing everything from creativity, then it won’t be such a scary thing.”
Sheldon is upfront about her concerns for the very existence of her industry as technology and society change. “I think the role of the documentarian is up for question and debate,” she says. “We live in a world where, whether it’s recent floodings in North Carolina or Kentucky or wherever, you don’t need the news or a documentarian—you go straight to the person on the ground.
The early days of documentary were showing injustices that were going unseen because the average person couldn’t document their life, and that’s just not our reality now,” Sheldon adds. “I’m interested in stepping into what does it look like in a post-documentary world where we are so siloed in terms of our information and facts are debated and people also document their own lives?”
Both as a filmmaker and as a child of Appalachia, Sheldon is putting all her chips on the future without forgetting the past. “I wish, for this state and this region, for there to be a reminder that if we don’t come up with new ideas about who we are and who we can be, then all we’re left with is looking at the pieces of the past on the floor that we’ve already tried,” she says. “My dream is just that people don’t discount imagination and creativity as a part of creating a new economy and a new existence for us.”
This feature first appeared in Mission’s ‘Women of Today‘ issue.
