When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced on 6 March 1984 that she would close 20 coal mines, there was little clue it would spark the country’s longest strike and leave Britain’s trade unions sorely diminished decades later.

For a year roughly 160,000 coal miners from across the UK walked off the job as the government declared war on the unions. Thirty years on, “there’s a huge battle for interpretation about it,” said Owen Gower, director of Still the Enemy Within, at its Frontline Club screening on Friday 3 October.

With first-hand accounts from members of the National Union of Mineworkers who manned the strike’s front lines, the documentary digs deep into archival footage – much never seen before and shot by the miners themselves – to give voice to the men and women who Thatcher labeled ‘the enemy within’.

“There’s documents that just came out today about Margaret Thatcher’s involvement in the strike,” said Gower, referencing recent revelations about the controversial Ridley Plan to crush the powerful unions and Thatcher’s comments in an interview that the miner’s struck at the heart of democracy.

In Their Own Words
“We felt that the story from the miner’s point of view of the strike hadn’t really been told,” said Gower, sitting in conversation with the film’s producer Mark Lacey. To remain neutral, the two crowd-funded the film after meeting several miners.

“It was meeting the miners themselves and them just being such amazing characters,” Gower said, “that it felt like it was something that had to be a lot bigger and reach a much broader audience.”

To tell the miners’ story without the aid of voice over, their small team waded “through something like 2,000 news clips, and then films on top of that, and then another 2,000 photos,” Gower said. “To introduce any outside voice at all would have felt completely wrong,” he added. “Even when there’s a montage . . . they’re still all based on the interviews of the miners.”

A History Lesson for Today
For the miners, the film isn’t just a history lesson, but an ongoing fight that has shaped Britain and the argument over privatising the NHS – a struggle many of the miners in the film are involved in resisting today. “It’s important to recognise that some of these people are still labeled ‘the enemy within’. That conclusion about crazy militants led by a mad communist leader, if you like, is still there,” said Gower. The argument about it being ordinary people has not been won at all.”

From Victory to Defeat
Cabinet papers that emerged in January 2014 confirm government plans to use the army to break the strike after a vote by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) to strike in solidarity with the miners pushed them to the edge of victory. “What’s interesting is that when we shot those interviews [with the miners] in August and September last year, and then the cabinet papers came out in January after that,” said Gower, “every single thing the miners had said was then confirmed in those papers.”

Absence of Labour
Tellingly absent in the film is the voice of the Labour Party, Gower said. “It’s a such a complicated and complex issue that you want to manage to tell the story in a way that people can relate to it and access it if they didn’t know a lot about the strike,” Lacey added.

Taking it to the People
Gower and Lacey are embarking on a cross-country, 48-screening tour of the film, which already scooped up the audience award at the 2014 Sheffield Doc Fest. They are working especially with communities in Wales, the North East and Scotland affected by the strike to educate young people about their community’s living history. “It’s something that is dying out around those areas,” said Gower. So I think it’s really important to get it to as many places as possible.”

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The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw was a despised gift from Stalin and after the fall of communism, some suggested pulling it down. Today, the palace is still standing, and is home to a theatre, a concert hall, a cinema, a swimming pool, and hundreds of offices.

Director Tomasz Wolski takes us on a cinematic journey through what is more than just a building: The Palace of Culture and Science is both a reflection of Poland’s everyday life and its rich history. Wolski also shows how the building is kept alive, how the Soviet machines are still working 50 years on.

Urszula Chowaniec, Ph.D., teaches at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she is also head of  eMigrating Lanscapes, a project on literary and artistic representations of emigration. She is currently writing a book on the notion of displacement as seen in literature in post-communist Poland.

Directed by Tomasz Wolski
Duration: 82′
Year: 2012

The evening will start with the short film Returns (PL)

On 10 April 2010, one of the most important dates in modern Polish history, 96 people, including the Polish president and government representatives died in a plane crash near Smolensk. They were on their way to Russia to participate in a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, the mass murder of Polish officers carried out by the NKVD. Returns shows the preparations for the commemoration ceremony, resulting in a film as surreal as the events themselves.

Directed by Krzystof Kadlubowski
Duration: 7′
Year: 2010