The first feature film made by legendary documentary filmmaker Tony Buba, “Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy,” will be shown for free Saturday at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.

The 1:30 p.m. screening will be introduced by Edith Abeyta, artist and founder of Arts Excursions Unlimited. A discussion will be held after the 80-minute film.

“Lightning Over Braddock” is being screened as part of the museum’s “Working Thought” film series and exhibition, which examines how art looks at economic disparity and labor in America. Buba’s film, released in 1988, tells the story of the decline of his hometown as the steel industry was dying.

The film won several prestigious awards, including Best Film at the Birmingham International Film Festival in England, and was also shown at Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, and over a dozen other major film festivals. In 2020, film critic Richard Brody of The New Yorker named “Lightning Over Braddock” one of the 62 most influential documentaries ever made.

“I wanted to show what was going on with all the jobs being lost,” said Buba. “When I started making the film back then, I thought for sure there would be a groundswell of people protesting all the closing of the mills. But all the safety measures that were put in with staggering mill closings and extended unemployment really diffused a lot of the anger.”

Buba said “Lightning Over Braddock” still holds up after all these years because the same issues exist.

“Those jobs still haven’t been replaced,” he said. “In the film, I mentioned that the baby boomers might not have the same living as their parents did. Now you look at the new generation and ask: Are they going to have a lesser standard of living than what their parents had?”

Reservations for the screening can be made at cmoa.org/event/lightning-over-braddock.

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