Last autumn the gay-themed Pride went into production with a cast full of great British actors including Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Andrew Scott and Paddy Considine.
Now the first image from the movie has been released to tie in with the announcement that the movie will close the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2014 International Cannes Film Festival on 23rd May.
The movie is set during the summer of 1984, when Margaret Thatcher is in power and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is on strike. At the Gay Pride March in London, a group of gay and lesbian activists decides to raise money to support the families of the striking miners. But there is a problem. The Union seems embarrassed to receive their support.
But the activists are not deterred. They decide to ignore the Union and go direct to the miners. They identify a mining village in deepest Wales and set off in a mini bus to make their donation in person. And so begins the extraordinary story of two seemingly alien communities who form a surprising and ultimately triumphant partnership.
Pride is directed by the Tony Award winning theatre director Matthew Warchus (Matilda: The Musical, God of Carnage), with a screenplay by Stephen Beresford whose debut stage play, The Last of the Haussmans (starring Julie Walters), was a critical and commercial hit at the National Theatre in 2012.
Last month Andrew Scott took part in the special 50th Anniversary National Theatre Live, in which he played a scene with Dominic Cooper as a gay couple in Angels In America. It’s not the first time he’s played gay, but generally he’s kept his own sexuality private.
In the past, it was quite common for groups of people protesting about different things to come to the aid of each other. Now Matthew Warchus, who’s best known as a theatre director, is planning a movie called Pride about a group of gay activists called ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’, who decide to raise money to help the families of British miners who were striking in the summer of 1984.