Coal, Earth, Home (Heuerdorfer Erde) + Info

“Coal, Earth, Home” is a documentary about what home means to a group of villagers who may lose their 750-year-old hometown, Heuersdorf. The Saxon village is to be raized for the expansion of the adjacent lying open pit mine – one of the last surviving mines of the continually shrinking brown coal mining industry in the former East Germany. The largely American multinational mining company claims the need for the coal underneath Heuersdorf to fuel its new power plant. The environmental and human costs of energy production become very evident through this dilemna.

Interviews with townspeople, speeches by top politicians and images of the quaint town contrasted with colossal mining machinery, portray a conflict of economics, resources, politics and the individual person common to the world over in the face of “progress”.

(documentary, 40 min., Germany/USA)
(Prize Winner – Catalonia International Environmental Film Festival, Spain. Screened at multiple festivals around the world.)