White Coal is less a film about coal, although it uses the material as its source of investigation, than an exploration into motifs of industrial films from the 1920s to the present. Loosely inspired by Hermann Melville’s The Confidence Man, a story about a blind passenger aboard a Mississippi steamboat, one thread of the film follows a crew of workers on a Polish coal ship. A second thread portrays the architecture and circumstances of coal burning at the world’s largest coal-burning power plant, located in Taychung, Taiwan.