Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave

This documentary does a great job of showing the raw emotions on both sides. By spending a lot of time filming the various miners and their reactions to the past, Deller is able to let the audience empathize with them. The original riot/battle was devastating for the miners' community, and we can see that. Plus, the mix of original miners and actors made the reenactment both realistic and full of emotion. The reenactment pretty much looked real. The "police" looked like they were really beating down with their batons. In fact, if we didn't know it was a reenactment, the scenes look like they could have been captured from the real thing. And this is a direct effect of how much bottled up emotion people still had from the event. Even though the miners' weren't actors, they were still able to convey such vivid emotion because those emotions were real. Still, many of them looked like they were having fun during the rehearsals and such. But afterwards, they still had to return to the bleak reality of their lives.

And like many of them said, this event wasn't really talked about or revisited until Deller decided to make the reenactment. This allowed the miners to perhaps make peace with the past. Also, the fact that this documentary and reenactment portrayed the situation as true to reality as possible was very important, as the biased news media at the time didn't show the truth. I imagine that it was like a breath of fresh air for the miners, to finally see their perspectives made public.