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Catherine Pancake films are usually short and typically challenging. They sometimes do without traditional linear storytelling. One of her longest and most-praised films is a 30-minute adaptation of a story about a man trying to win the love of his life by making a suit out of Vienna sausages.

"Black Diamonds," Pancake's film about mountaintop removal mining, is a very different animal. A conventional documentary, "Black Diamonds" gathers testimony from opponents and proponents of the process and provides a 90-minute glimpse of life in West Virginia's coalfields.

A coal mining process that begins with clear-cutting, mountaintop removal uses explosives and machinery to remove soil and rock, exposing coal seams. The soil is often pushed into valleys, raising the valley floor while lowering the mountain, dramatically changing the area's appearance and ecology.

Some of these mines cover tens of thousands of acres.

Pancake grew up in West Virginia. Her father, a minister, was active in the 1970s fight against unregulated strip mining. Even so, she wasn't prepared for what she saw at mountaintop removal sites.

"I thought it was shocking that the landscape would be changed so radically on such a large scale," Pancake said.

Though Pancake's sentiments are clearly with the anti-mountaintop removal faction -- the film's subtitle is "Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice" -- she lets the mining industry have its say.

"Everybody was completely nice, completely warm and very, very open," Pancake said.

Pancake, who lives in Baltimore, began visiting West Virginia in 2000 to work on the film. By 2004, it was nearly finished. Then she decided to incorporate events from last year's Mountain Justice Summer campaign.

"I just really got into the story," she said last week. "I felt like it was a story that needed to be told clearly."

"Black Diamonds" is still a work in progress, Pancake said, though she's been showing it to focus groups in Baltimore for months. It's been an educational experience.

"A lot of people don't know their electricity comes from burning coal," she said.

Audiences outside the coalfields have learned other things, too.

"I think people have stereotypes about what goes on in Appalachia," Pancake said.

In the film, a bearded man in a baseball cap describes the effect of explosions miners set off near his house. He says he can fell the concussion in his chest.

At one screening, Pancake said, someone in the audience remarked, "Oh. That's a big word."

In another scene, a shirtless man leans against a pickup truck bed and says that if you kill the mountains, you kill the people.

Pancake said a reviewer writing in the alternative newsweekly Baltimore City Paper expressed surprise that such a man could make such a poetic statement.

"It's such a revelation," Pancake said, for some people to see Appalachians as real people with real problems.

Some viewers come to understand, Pancake said, "There are a lot of people in the Appalachian states and the southern states who are dealing with problems more serious than they have in their suburban homes."

It's good for those suburbanites to realize, she said, "My luxury is coming at the price of somebody else's mountains."

"Black Diamonds" played to about 200 people in Charleston, W.Va., last month. The reactions inside and outside that state have been very different, Pancake said.

Outside West Virginia, people who have seen the film seem interested in the people who live in the coalfields. They want to know what they can do to help untangle the dilemma of an industry that provides jobs and tax money but is making drastic changes to the state's landscape, culture and ecosystems while employing significantly fewer West Virginians than it used to.

Inside the state, Pancake said, the issue is simply polarizing.