Borinage(Film, 1933)

Misère au Borinage (French; lit. 'Poverty' or 'Penury in the Borinage'), also known as Borinage, is a 1934 Belgian documentary film directed by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens. Produced during the Great Depression, the film's theme is intensely socialist, covering the poor living conditions of workers, particularly coal miners, in the Borinage region of Hainaut Province in Belgium. It is considered a classic work of political cinema and has been described as "one of the most important references in the documentary genre". Misère au Borinage was shot in black and white and is a silent film with intertitles in French and Dutch. It opens with a title card, bearing the slogan: "Crisis in the Capitalist World. Factories are closed down, abandoned. Millions of proletarians are hungry!" and shows footage of the repression of a 1933 strike in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in the United States. The film then shifts to the Borinage, an industrial region in Belgium's Hainaut Province, during and after the general strike of 1932. The majority of the film focuses on the plight of Borinage coal miners who have been... ()