Legacy Ashes

From the Ashes captures Americans in communities across the country as they wrestle with the legacy of the coal industry and what its future should be under the Trump Administration. From Appalachia to the West's Powder River Basin, the film goes beyond the rhetoric of the "war on coal" to present compelling and often heartbreaking stories about what's at stake for our economy, health, and climate. The film invites audiences to learn more about an industry on the edge and what it means for their lives.

Come now, let us all genuflect before Lamb of God, for to them we owe our metal souls. In the fat rat-infested, decrepit tenement called Heavy Rock Manor, the Virginia-based shock unit is one of the few groups striving to keep the power on and the hallways clear of gluttonous rap-rock/post-grunge False Marias. Yes, yes, Ashes of the Wake arrives via Epic Records, but this only will inflame the ire of the ignorant. For the rest of us, Lamb's ascendance to the majors melts a little more of the crap rock golden calf. Where previous efforts were fully automatic hot LZs, they were also slightly muddled for the very same reason. They fired in all directions. With Ashes, producer Machine has sharpened the corner of every riff and tightened the turns on classicist metal gallops.

On a hot rainy summer night in Nassau, the Bahamas, in 1943, someone murdered Sir Harry Oakes, one of the richest men in the world, as he slept. When police found him the next morning, there were four wounds to his skull. His corpse had been abused, covered ritualistically with feathers and set on fire. The murder was perverse, horrific and jaded by anyone’s standards. A few evenings later in New York City, the phone rang in the home of Alan Hynd, identified in that era by the NY Times as America’s highest paid true crime reporter. The Oakes case would send the writer, with a quarter of a century of experience covering murders, to the Bahamas in wartime…