Strike: An Uncivil War – director interview

–

Strike: An Uncivil War explores the events leading up to, and the devastating aftermath of, the battle of Orgreave. It was the most violent altercation during the miners strikes of 1984-1985, where hundreds of striking workers were met with unnecessary violence and force from paramilitary trained police officers.
Now in its 40th anniversary, the strikers are yet to see any real justice or parliamentary acknowledgement. Made up from extensive archive footage and interviews with many of the workers from Orgreave and members of the unions, it’s an extremely well-crafted and important film. Strike gives a voice to this silenced community, and will hopefully usher in a new understanding of the strikes and what these people were really standing up against.

–

–

We had the pleasure of discussing the film with its director, Sheffield-born Daniel Gordon (known for the BAFTA-winning documentary Hillsborough), who seeks to tell the true story of what happened at Orgreave in 1984.

–

Ben Matthews (Reel Steel): What were your experiences with coming to understand Orgreave and the miners strikes, do you think there’s an issue surrounding awareness of it?

Daniel Gordon: Yeah, there is a huge issue around awareness of it. Anyone under 40, maybe even a bit under 50, doesn’t really know. I’m just over 50 so I grew up with it. My mum grew up in Fircroft, and when she was sixteen she came to live in Sheffield so I grew up knowing all about it. I grew up in Manchester but as a Sheff Wednesday fan I used to come watch them all the time, so during that whole year I was very aware of it. Earlier there were the steel strikes in Sheffield, so I sort of understood those a little bit but they were in the background, in terms of Sheff Wednesday fans going to watch who was on strike, both in the steel strike in 1980 and then the miners strike in 1984.
I’ve always known about it, and I knew there was something very very wrong with everything that was going on. I wasn’t really old enough to understand everything. I thought my main impetus to make this came after I made Hillsborough. There was an obvious understanding from me that there was Hillsborough, but then there was Orgreave before that and the miners strike as a whole.
In the late nineties, when I was in the Workstation with Chrysalis, we did a pitch to Channel 4 about a series on strikes, and doing a six part series and a film on each one. The miners strike was obviously going to be the lead film on that, because it was still quite raw then, only 15 years or so after the strike. There’s a line in this, ‘part of history forgotten’, and they certainly feel like they’ve been forgotten. If you go on any of their Facebook pages where they’re all having chat and very intense conversation amongst themselves, then it almost feels like noone outside of that group has ever been listening.
So I think the film will certainly raise awareness, along with other things that are going on for the event. It’s remarkable, in eight days time it’s the 40th anniversary. Hillsborough took many thousands of football fans and 27 years to get justice, and these guys have been waiting 40 years now and still no real justice has arrived for them.

BM: Were you approaching Hillsborough with this background in mind, and for you was it a similar process?

Daniel Gordon: With Hillsborough we had a section, it didn’t make the film, about the miners strike and trying to go back in time from ‘89 to ‘84. To see the militarisation of the South Yorkshire police during that period. In the end it got cut, there’s too many things to put in. I had in mind there was something I needed to do with the miners strike. I needed to come and revisit that.
The problem was, when we finished Hillsborough and it came out in 2016, I just felt like we needed to be making something from Orgreave, but there was this hint from the Conservative government at the time that there was going to be this inquiry, something like the Hillsborough Independent Panel that happened in 2012. I felt it was going to be something I could carry on researching but I’d have to park because legally I wouldn’t be able to do anything. And they shut that down within a year, by which time I’m on to other projects. So it’s taken the best part of 7 or 8 years to finish.
There’s a bit in this film, which shows a crush within Orgreave, which is quite reminiscent of the crush at Hillsborough. It obviously stopped because the police lines parted and the horses came in, and that’s what stopped the pressure. The similarities, for me, are quite clear. Hillsborough is never mentioned within the film but the similarities are very clear. I’ve come to see this film as a bit of a prequel to Hillsborough. If you’ve seen Hillsborough you’ll need to watch this, because without this there is no Hillsborough.

BM: What was the process like when making this, of connecting those who were at Orgreave? Is there quite a big community still between those workers and the unions?

DG: There are, and there’s also people who have never spoken before. They’ve all had a really difficult relationship with the media; The BBC especially. Near the very beginning this was being developed in association with the BBC, it’s not ended up as a BBC project.
I can get people’s trust because of the projects I’ve done, especially because of Hillsborough. As research goes, one thing leads to another. For me, it was important to speak to as many people as possible. Even before we commit to film them. I’ve been working on this on or off for the best part of 7 years, it’s been intense for 2 years where we’ve been figuring out who connects with what. There were a lot of times when we had interviewed them and then found them in the archive.
We did that in Hillsborough, there’s a guy called Brian Anderson we randomly found on some archive footage afterwards when he’s at the Hallamshire Hospital. We thought just because of that archive we wanted to go and find him. The same thing happened with this.
The magic really is when you interview people and you find them in the mass of people at Orgreave. Don and Jackie, who were in the archive quite a bit, and who are are a lovely couple. Jackie wrote a book back in ‘85 which we knew about. I didn’t realise how much archive there was of them out there, and it was really lovely to get the archive and try and weave that into the story.

BM: In those two years while you were intensely focusing on this film, were you visiting Orgreave as it is now? Is there much of a sense of community or commemoration?

DG: There’s nothing left of the plant itself. People living there have no idea of what it used to be. It’s really difficult to get your bearings in Orgreave. We eventually found the original railway bridge that they were chased over, as some went down the bankings. I did go there a bit, and we went to a few mining communities where people live.
We really tried to get a personal relationship going with the people we were interviewing. I did a film about twenty years ago about a greyhound track up near Barnsley, a place called Goldthorpe, which was ex-mining. You could see the social devastation that was brought upon by the end of the strike. You could see that twenty years ago, it’s probably worse now.
You can see within the last few scenes what’s happened to an awful lot of communities. People forget that these guys weren’t just striking for money or for better pay or working conditions, they were striking to keep their jobs and to keep their communities. What they feared would happen, did happen, but in an even worse way than they had thought.

BM: I saw a poster yesterday near Division Street for the upcoming rally taking place for the 40th anniversary.

DG: The rally used to be over at Orgreave. They would meet at a pub and march to where it was, and then march back. Over the years they’ve relocated it to Sheffield city centre. A sign of the times. Like last year, they met at the city hall and marched to Devonshire green because that’s the most they [surviving miners] can do now.
It’s 40 years on, and most of the people in our film have very serious health issues. They’re doing a slightly longer march this year because it’s the 40th anniversary, but also because a lot of the actual miners won’t be able to do it. And I think that’s what’s really concerning people, that there’s still no justice for these people. An awful lot of them aren’t here, and very soon more of them won’t be here to see, hopefully, some sort of inquiry or something that they can look at as justice for what happened to them.

It’s going to be quite an interesting weekend. We’re all gonna go. We’ve got the rally on Saturday, and the premiere on Sunday.

BM: That works out nicely. Are you excited for the premiere?

DG: It’s going to be great. I mean, the Crucible has 600 odd seats. It’s going to be massive. We are the #1 selling film at DocFest so far. And then two days later it’s going to be nationally released. It’s looking like an amazing takeup for this film, which will be absolutely staggering. I haven’t had a documentary film distributed in the cinema to this extent before. It’s taken me by surprise really.

BM: There’s so many heartbreaking accounts of the events included in the film, it’s great that some of them will be able to see the documentary as a type of social justice.

DG: We held a preview for a couple of miners recently, and the nice thing that they said was whenever another miner is talking, it’s as if they’re talking for them. Even if they’re only in it a couple of times, they feel like they’re in it a lot because everyone is speaking for them. They all had the same experience and same feelings of loss and trauma. It’s a brutal film at times and very emotional, especially the last half hour which is a real gut wrench.
For the premiere, I really want to feel that with a big audience. There’s something about seeing any film in a cinema, but watching your own with a paying audience will be very different. It’s going to be quite a raw event, let’s put it that way.

–

Strike: An Uncivil War premieres at DocFest Sunday June 16th, at the Crucible Theatre:

https://www.sheffdocfest.com/film/strike-uncivil-war

---