About film

In this film, experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison combines newly shot aerial scenes that he filmed himself with historic found-footage images of the mining communities of Northeast England that he culled from the British national archives. Morrison creates a moving and formally elegant tribute to this vanished era of working-class life, enriched by an original score by avant-garde Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The Miners’ Hymns celebrates the sense of vibrant community, rich, self-organized culture and the forbearance that characterized the dangerous lives of those who worked underground, and the places in which they lived, whilst marking the demise of the mining industry not only as the end of a way of life, but as the last gasp of the Industrial Revolution.