I know this is an older movie, and in fact I’ve watched it a couple of times before, but I saw it again last week because it’s streaming free on Amazon Prime. Plus, it’s a great movie to watch when you’re stuck at home as a precaution against the plague because at its heart, it’s about found family and community building. It’s about the small ways we win even when we don’t succeed at defeating the big problems, and the repercussions of having hope.
Pride is a British indie movie about the LGBT group that comes together to support families affected by the 1984 miner’s strike. It’s a real thing that happened during a real time of crisis – queer folks stood up for people who didn’t much want their help, and ultimately brought a lot of those folks around. It did, in real life, inspire the miners union to stand up for LGBT people in return.
There are a lot of great actors playing very sweet characters, including Bill Nighy as a gentle old miner, Andrew Scott as a gay bookstore owner, Imelda Staunton as the head of the strike committee, and Paddy Considine as a local head of the miners union. There’s some hard moments – this is set in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and queer people faced so much discrimination. The movie lets you see that of course, but it has a relatively happy ending, and should leave you feeling a little better about what we can accomplish when we work together.