TWO political documentaries stood out in 2014. Skip Kite's Tony Benn: Will And Testament won the Edinburgh International Film Festival Audience Award last June and, closer to home, Owen Gower's Still The Enemy Within took the equivalent prize – Britain's premier documentary award – at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the same month.

Tony Benn, who died last March, would have savoured Gower's film, a stirring, sad yet resilient and inspiring work that marks the 30th anniversary of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike that came to define the Margaret Thatcher era of breaking the power in the unions: the pitiless against the pits.

This is a film from the coal face, combining previously unseen archive footage with new interviews with those who were there on the frontline when, in the words of the film publicity, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared war on the unions and in particular, the strongest in the country, the National Union of Mineworkers. Britain's longest strike ensued, here charted chronologically over a year, and by the end, the power in energy had shifted, the NUM left numb, fatally wounded.

Thirty years of hurt are still raw in the words, eyes and hearts of the Yorkshire likes of Paul Symonds, Joyce Sheppard and Steve Hammill and North Easterner Norman Strike (and yes, it is his real name, as he had to explain repeatedly to police blocks when en route to picket lines).

Gower's film is all the more potent for its "No experts, no politicians" policy, their contributions left to soundbites from the time, Mrs Thatcher's eyes burning as fiercely as Steve Bell depicted so memorably in his cartoons as she talked of "the enemy within" and of violent insurrection.

Hear it from the other side, from the mouths of miners, and a picture is painted of government, judiciary, police, print media and the BBC all in collusion against the working man from the pit village. The footage of the clashes between 5,000 police and massed pickets at the Orgreave coking plant on June 18 1984 will leave you open-mouthed: such was its impact that it is forever filed under the Battle of Orgreave, as if a throwback to the English Civil War.

The key moment was not the bludgeoning brutality of Orgreave, but the failure of the TUC conference to support the NUM and its 160,000 workforce. Thirty years on, voice after head-shaking voice reckons that if just one other union had agreed to go on strike, the outcome would have been different; still coal, not dole. Instead, pit upon pit was forcibly closed, a mining museum opened, and as of 2013, 40 per cent of Britain’s energy is generated by coal, 80 per cent of it imported, so much energy from without.

What still burns in Still The Enemy Within is not (foreign) coal so much as an undying belief, a passion, that "we can still seek to do something about the future”: renewable energy of a different kind.