The 1984-85 miners strike was devastating for the British working class and signaled the waning of the labor movement’s power there, but it has been great for the British film industry. Films like Billy Elliot and Brassed Off (set a decade later) used the strike and the Thatcher government’s pit-closures program as a backdrop for sentimental, highly entertaining looks at communities in transition.
Judging from this newly released trailer, Pride hits a lot of those buttons, with a bonus fish-out-of-water—or in this case homos-out-of-the-gay-ghetto—theme. Directed by Matthew Warchus and featuring a murderer’s row of U.K. acting talent—Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Paddy Consindine, and Imelda Staunton, to name just a few—Pride tells the story of a group of London-based LGBTQ activists who raise money to support the struggling strikers and then head out to a Welsh mining village to build solidarity with a group they see as fellow victims of Thatcher’s bullying. What happens next will warm your heart, apparently.
The film, which was a popular hit at this year’s Cannes festival, will be released in Britain Sep. 12. Those accents, by the way are supposed to be Welsh, so, yes, that’s how Matthew Rhys, Michael Sheen, Rhys Ifans, and Ioan Gruffudd speak when they’re not acting.
