Harlan County USA (variously written with and without a comma) is a 1976 American documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike", a 1973 effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.

It was directed and produced by filmmaker Barbara Kopple, then early in her filmmaking career. A former VISTA volunteer, she had worked on other documentaries, especially as an advocate of workers' rights.

Kopple initially intended to make a film about Miners for Democracy and the attempt to unseat Tony Boyle as president of the UMWA.^{[citation needed]} When miners at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, went on strike against Duke Power Company in June 1973, Kopple went there to film the strike, which the UMWA had helped to organize. She decided it was the more compelling subject, so switched the focus of her film. In all, she worked on the film for four years, including preparation and editing.

When Kopple and her cameraman Hart Perry showed up on the picket line, the locals were suspicious of their intentions. Rumors flew that a "hippie crew from New York" was sniffing around the strike. When she confronted a striker who told people not to talk to her, she was told: "Girl, you gotta tell people here what you're doin'."

Kopple and her crew spent years with the families depicted in the film, documenting the dire straits they encountered while striking for safer working conditions, fair labor practices, and decent wages. She followed them to picket in front of the Stock Exchange in New York City, filming interviews with people affected by black lung disease, and miners being shot at while striking.

The company insisted on having a no-strike clause in the proposed new contract. The miners were concerned that accepting such a provision would limit their ability to influence local working conditions. This sticking point became moot when, a few years after the strike, the UMWA folded the agreement won by this group of workers into a global contract.

Rather than using narration to tell the story, Kopple chose to film the words and actions of the people themselves. For example, when the strike breakers and others hired by the company show up early in the film—the strikers call them "gun thugs"—the company people tried to keep their guns hidden from the camera. As the strike dragged on for nearly a year, both sides eventually openly brandished their weapons. Kopple felt it was important to continue filming (or pretend to, even when they were out of film) because the presence of the crew and staff support seemed to help keep the violence down.

Kopple did provide facts and statistics about the companies and the workers. She notes that Duke Power Company's profits increased 170 percent in a single year. Meanwhile, the striking miners, many of whom are living in squalid conditions without utilities or running water, were offered a 4% pay increase, at a time when the estimated cost of living increase was 7% for that same year.