Image Credit: A film still from ‘The Last Men Standing’ (2024, dir. Russell Smith). Former miner Walter Sherriff (Blackhall Colliery) pictured outside the now-derelict pub ‘The Seagull’ at Blackhall.
RPS member Russell Smith is a Hartlepool-born film maker who has recently completed an MA in Arts Practice, specialising in photography and independent film production, at the Northern School of Art (NSA). For the past year Russell has been collaborating, through the NSA, with RPS President Simon Hill HonFRPS. Together they have been documenting the lives of 15 ex-miners from the former Blackhall, Easington, and Horden collieries in the East Durham Coalfield.
The collaborative exhibition - titled ‘The Last Men Standing’ - showed Simon’s portraits of the miners alongside Russell’s documentary photographs of the three villages, together with the personal stories of the 15 miners. The exhibition, and the accompanying book, received regional and national coverage in newspapers, magazines and TV.
During the course of the project, Russell and Simon filmed interviews with all 15 miners and these recordings have now been compiled by Russell into a 75 minute documentary film that explores the lives of the miners, their work in the collieries, the Miners’ Strike of 1984, and the ultimate decline and eventual demise of the East Durham coalfield and its communities.
The film - which borrows the exhibition title ‘The Last Men Standing’ - was edited by Huw Jones and received its first screening at Cineworld in Seaham on Wednesday 4 September. Between now and early 2025 the film will feature in film festivals in the UK and USA before going on general release in mid-2025.
Speaking about the ambitions of the documentary film, Russell said:
“The coal industry, along with several other heavy industries, are now no longer visible on the landscape of the North East or, perhaps, anywhere in the UK. The only true and accurate accounts we have of what powered the industrial revolution and beyond are held within the memories of the people who carried out the work.
As they pass away, the stories of how their communities were built, flourished, and then declined beyond any recognition, dies with them. The next couple of decades is probably our final chance to capture the first person testimony of those who worked in mining and so many of the great British industries, and to hear of the life and the communities that made the industrial towns and villages, before they are lost forever.”