FEATURE DOCUMENTARY｜HISTORICAL・POETIC

Underground Home Alive

2025.12.13

Logline

As the memory of the mining era fades, former miners and their families continue a long struggle to have pneumoconiosis recognized as an occupational disease—revealing the human cost behind the energy that once powered modern society.

Synopsis

For decades, mining fueled industrial development across the world. Beneath the ground, generations of miners extracted the energy that powered factories, cities, and modern life. But when the mines closed, many workers were left with an invisible legacy: damaged lungs and unrecognized illness.

Underground Home Alive follows former miners and their families as they continue the long struggle to have pneumoconiosis recognized as an occupational disease. Through personal testimonies, archival traces, and the landscapes of abandoned mines, the film uncovers how a disappearing industry continues to shape bodies, memories, and communities.

While the world moves toward new forms of energy and technology, the story of the miners asks a lingering question: what is the human cost behind the systems that power progress?

Director’s Statement

Mining was once considered the foundation of modern development. Across the world, communities were built around the extraction of resources buried beneath the earth. Yet the end of this era did not end the consequences for those who labored underground.

Pneumoconiosis is a slow and often invisible disease. For many miners, the struggle has not only been against illness, but against the long process of having that illness recognized as the cost of their work.

This film began with a simple question: when an industry disappears, what happens to the bodies that built it?

The story of miners is not confined to one place. It echoes across continents and generations. As humanity enters new technological eras—from industrial energy to digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence—the question remains unresolved: who bears the hidden cost of the systems that power our future?

Remembering the miners is not only about the past. It is also about how we understand progress, responsibility, and the unseen labor behind every technological age.

Cinematic Approach

The cinematic language of the film is quiet, patient, and poetic. Rather than reconstructing history, the camera takes the role of a witness.

Many of the miners portrayed in the film are already in the final chapters of their lives. The camera observes them with stillness and care, allowing their gestures, their pauses, and their breathing to unfold in real time. Long takes create a space where the act of being seen becomes meaningful, and where presence itself carries emotional weight.

Breathing forms the central motif of the film’s sound design. Pneumoconiosis slowly alters the most basic rhythm of life: the breath. Throughout the film, the soundscape emphasizes inhalations, pauses, strained breathing, and moments of silence between breaths. These fragile rhythms become a reminder that the history of industrial labor is written in the body.

Underground tunnels, abandoned mining sites, and surrounding landscapes will be filmed as spaces that still hold the memory of breath and labor. The darkness of the mine, the narrow passages, and the echoes of air moving through these spaces subtly mirror the interior world of damaged lungs.

The film is guided by a simple belief: to witness can also be a form of healing.

For decades, many miners lived with an illness that remained invisible and unrecognized. By listening to their stories and observing their presence with patience, the film attempts to restore dignity to bodies that once carried the weight of an industry.

For industries that are disappearing, there is little we can change. What we can do is to look carefully, to listen sincerely, and to accompany those who remain. In this sense, the film becomes both a record and a quiet farewell to a fading era.

Status：Pre-Production

Expected Production：2026