Sarah Smith, known as Sallie, was facing very serious illness when she took on the single most powerful institution in her home state of Alabama – the electric utility Alabama Power.

As her last act in life, she made it her mission to get the company to do something about a potential environmental catastrophe: coal ash — the residue of burning coal for electricity — collecting in a reservoir next to Alabama Power’s ‘Plant Barry’ facility near the Gulf coast. The problem? The pit was unlined and if the levees surrounding it should breach, “21 million tons of toxic ash would be released into the Mobile River and Bay,” according to the makers of the Oscar-contending documentary Sallie’s Ashes .

The film directed and produced by Brennan Robideaux and produced by Daniel Junge shows how

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