News / Arts
Preview: Pride
Pride, which opens at the Watershed tomorrow, is a film about the unlikely alliance between a group of gay activists and a mining village in Wales whose colliery is threatened with closure. Paul Hassan from Ujima Radio, who is hosting a Q&A after the 5.30pm screening with original members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, reveals a personal connection.
I saw Pride in London earlier this month with a combination of wild excitement and huge trepidation.
Why? Because as I discovered a few months earlier Pride, a film set in the dark days of Thatcherism and the miners strike in, 1984 to 1985, had at its heart, the story of my very good friend and political comrade, Mark Ashton, the founder member of Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM).
is needed now More than ever
The film tells the story of the how and why LGSM came into being, a story many people find almost unbelievable. It’s effectively a story of solidarity between the bastion of the working class, the miners from Onllwyn in the Dulais valley in south Wales and the lesbian and gay community of swinging London during the year-long strike.
On the face of it you couldn’t imagine two communities with so little in common. Or could you?
As Ben Schnetzer, who plays Mark Ashton, says in the film, the miners were vilified in the press, harassed and attacked by the police and marginalised and legislated against by the Thatcher government: the enemy within. Just like the lesbian and gay community.
Remember, this film was set in a time before equality in the age of consent between the gay and heterosexual men , when gay marriage equality was a mere pipedream and when the notorious Section 28 made it a criminal offence to “promote the teaching in any school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
I won’t spoil Pride for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it’s an astonishing achievement for a mainstream film, it’s funny, raw, emotional -though avoids sentimentality.
It has a razor sharp script, a host of standout characters thrown together in a cauldron of working class and identity politics, it’s beautifully directed and brilliantly acted.
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