In 1933 Henri Storck, who was one of the leading figures of the Belgium film avant-garde, asked Joris Ivens to help him to make a film about the social consequences of the miners strike in the Borinage the year before. Arriving at this mine region Storck and Ivens forgot about aesthetics. As Henri Storck tells: " We stopped thinking about cinema and how to frame shots and instead bacame dominated by the irrepressible need to produce images as stark, bare, and sincere as possible to fit the cruel facts reality had thrown at us." In a sober style the film confronts the spectator with the misery of the miners; unemployed or exploited by the mine companies they were, with their families, expelled from their homes if they couldn't afford the rent. Ivens used the method of re-enactment to incorporate the miners strike of 1932 in the film.