A benefit screening of “Harlan County, USA,” an Academy Award-winning documentary, to benefit the legal defense fund of the 47 East Third Street Tenants’ Association, will be held Sat., Nov. 12, at 4 p.m. at Two Boots Pioneer Cinema at East Third Street and Avenue A. The tenants are fighting their landlords’ attempts to evict them from the five-story, multiunit building under the owner-occupancy provision of the Rent Stabilization Code. Twenty-four residents currently reside in 11 rent-regulated apartments, many of them having lived there 20 years or more. The landlords want the building so they can turn it into a mansionlike private residence.
The documentary film, directed by Barbara Kopple, concerns the 1973 coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky. The strike lasted more than a year, seeing bloody skirmishes between company thugs and scabs and picketing miners and their wives.
