Earlier this year, Pride won the Queer Palm at Cannes film festival. Since then it’s become one of the most internationally popular feelgood films of 2014. Set in 1984, during the miners’ strike in Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher, it’s been likened to The Full Monty and Billy Elliot for its mix of social realism, pathos and inimitable British humour.
It’s the reallife story of an unlikely friendship which developed between a mining community in the Dulais Valley in South Wales and a Londonbased gay and lesbian group that raised money to
support them.
In the film, Dominic West plays Jonathan Blake, one of the original members of Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners. The real Jonathan Blake was a special guest at Bologna’s Gender Bender festival when the film made its recent Italian première in Italy. I caught up with him there and found out more about the real life events of 30 years ago and what it was like to relive them on the screen.
(first broadcast on Inside Europe, Deutsche Welle Radio, 4th December, 2014)