One of the most sensitive and rigorously edited of British documentaries, Coal Face was a landmark collaboration of the peripatetic Brazilian-born director Alberto Cavalcanti, composer Benjamin Britten, and the poet W. H. Auden (who wrote the narration). The film is a precise delineation of the many facets of what was once, as the narrator tells us, "the basic industry of Britain" and a paean to the human figures who made that possible.