“Shut up and sing”, an angry fan shouted at the Dixie Chicks in the tumult that followed the group’s negative remarks about President Bush. From that shout comes the title for Barbara Kopple’s latest film.
Director/Producer Kopple is no stranger to the documentary form: she has two Oscars for earlier work — one for Harlan County, USA (1976), a film about the coal field strikes in Kentucky in 1973, one for American Dream (1991), a work about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Minnesota in 1986. Shut Up and Sing (2006) (co-directed by Cecilia Peck) is about the Dixie Chicks, and the latest film to document the relationship between film, American politics, and the ongoing dialogue we periodically seem to have with popular culture.
