Festival premiere for Battle of Orgreave film

Mounted police charged at picketing miners in Orgreave in 1984

A new documentary about the Battle of Orgreave, in which striking miners clashed with police in South Yorkshire, is to premiere at Sheffield's DocFest.

Strike: An Uncivil War will be screened for the first time on Sunday, two days before the 40th anniversary of the events at Orgreave.

Ninety-five miners were arrested after mounted police charged at protesters on the outskirts of Rotherham on 18 June 1984 in a pivotal moment in the year-long miners' strike.

The men faced charges of riot and unlawful assembly but their trials collapsed amid claims of police misconduct and perjury by officers.

Sheffield-born director Daniel Gordon told the BBC he hoped the film would leave viewers with an "understanding of what these people went through" in the strike.

"The miners were on strike not for wages, not for conditions - they were on strike for their jobs, to keep their jobs, to keep their communities going.

"And they feared what has come to pass in most of those communities since, of what would happen when you take the jobs away."

The filmmaker, whose mother grew up in the pit village of Thurcroft, near Rotherham, was 12 when the strike began.

"It was something I could only observe on television and through a child’s lens, but over the years I have always been determined to revisit this period."

Gordon won a Bafta for 2014 documentary Hillsborough, which tells the story of the 1989 disaster which claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool supporters at Sheffield Wednesday's football ground.

More than 100 picketers and police were injured at Orgreave

The director said his new film was one he had been "wanting to make for over a decade now" after realising there were links between Hillsborough and Orgreave, which both involved allegations of misconduct by South Yorkshire Police officers.

Gordon added: "There just seemed to be a connection there from one to the other and I knew when we did the Hillsborough film that I need to go back and make Orgreave."

More than 100 miners and police officers were injured in clashes outside Orgreave coking works on the most violent day of the miners' strike.

Thousands of miners who were fighting against pit closures had descended on the plant in a bid to stop lorries carrying coke to fuel the steel furnaces.

They were met by about 6,000 police officers, some on horses or with riot shields.

Strike: An Uncivil War will be screened at Sheffield DocFest at the Crucible theatre at 10:30 BST on Sunday 16 June.

Following its premiere at DocFest, the film will be shown at special screenings to mark the Battle of Orgreave on Tuesday before its general release in cinemas on 21 June.

The film is one of 109 documentaries being shown at Sheffield city-centre venues as part of DocFest, which runs until 17 June.

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