King Coal
The Saint Andrew Award for Best Film
This intersectional and multifaceted work embodies the truly hauntological nature of post-industrial society, and intertwines multiple dialectics – natural, generational, economic – into a work that is simultaneously bewildered and amazed by its subject matter. It is at once poetic and confrontational, quiet and observational, active in making and deconstructing myths, and ultimately unifies its multiple strands into a confident artistic examination of space, society, history, and community.
The Suso Cecchi Amico Award for Best Dramaturgy
King Coal is a tapestry of contemporary, modern, colonial, and indigenous myth-making. It is a narrative about the grand narratives that have shaped the Western world, and the ghosts that linger on following the decline and death of such ideologies. It is at once an amalgamation of the personal and the social, the present with the past, and humanity with the wider natural world.
The Witold Sobociński Award for Best Cinematography
King Coal provides fascinating insight about a great many things, and does so with incredible efficiency. Images throughout encapsulate myriad points of interest that are brought together through the film’s layering of differing temporal, social, racial, and economic existences under the multitude of ghosts haunting post-industrial communities. These images simultaneously speak for themselves and add essential visual examples to bolster the spoken word statements.