Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana professor of screen studies and Director, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, was invited by the Media Burn Archive to interview documentary legend and co-founder of Appalshop Mimi Pickering for their series “Virtual Talks with Video Activists.” The interview was on Zoom for a national audience on April 27, 2023, and will become part of the archive. They discussed Pickering’s landmark film, Chemical Valley.
Chemical Valley (Mimi Pickering and Anne Lewis, 1991). On Dec. 3, 1984, the worst industrial accident in history occurred when a toxic gas known as MIC leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killing at least 3,500 people and permanently disabling 50,000. The tragedy in Bhopal brought international attention to the predominantly African-American community of Institute, West Virginia, site of the only Union Carbide plant in the United States that manufactured MIC. Chemical Valley explores issues of job blackmail, racism, and citizens’ right to know and to act as it documents one community’s struggle to make accountable an industry that has all too often forced communities to choose between safety and jobs.
Mimi Pickering has been making films and videotapes with Appalshop since 1971. Her documentaries feature women as principal storytellers, focus on injustice and inequity, and explore the efforts of grassroots people to deal with community problems and work for change. Pickering’s award-winning documentaries include The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975), which was one of 25 “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant motion pictures named by the Librarian of Congress to the National Film Registry in 2005. Described by Newsweek as “a powerful piece of muckraking on film,” the documentary was a Silver Plaque winner at the Chicago International Film Festival.
Media Burn Archive is a nonprofit in Chicago that collects, producers, and distributes documentary video created by artists, activists, and community groups. Its mission is to use archival media to deepen context and to encourage critical thought through a social justice lens. The collection features 9,000+ videos from a geographically, socially, and economically diverse community of videomakers from around the world who share a deeply rooted commitment to increasing our understanding of other human beings and communities.
The collection’s roots are in the “guerrilla television” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the technology of portable videotape mobilized new groups of media makers to tell their communities’ stories with cheap, easy-to-use video cameras. No longer shut out of film and television unions or burdened by expensive equipment no one would teach them how to use, ordinary people were empowered to tell their own stories.