Precious

Since its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it won three awards (including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award), Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire confounded notions of what an "urban film" is, touching people of all backgrounds with its dramatic, vividly realized story of a Harlem teenager who overcomes tremendous obstacles to discover her own worth, beauty and potential. Precious is remarkable both for what it is—a film whose heroine is a darkskinned, plussize young woman in 1987 Harlem; and for what it is not—a static, standardissue treatise on the disadvantaged. Directed with passion and imagination by Lee Daniels, written with elegant economy by Geoffrey Fletcher, and brilliantly performed by a fearless ensemble cast, Precious is the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a sixteenyearold African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father; at home, she must wait hand and foot on her mother (Mo'Nique), a poisonously angry woman. Yet beneath her impassive expression, Precious is a watchful, curious young woman with an inchoate but unshakeable sense that other possibilities exist for her. In the literacy workshop taught by the patient yet firm Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), Precious begins a journey that will lead her from powerlessness to selfdetermination. Precious is filmmaker Lee Daniels's second directorial effort, but it is a film he has wanted to make since he first read Sapphire's novel, which was published in June 1996. Though the film world came knocking, Sapphire declined to entertain offers. A poet who performed her work in various venues, she had lived in Harlem for a decade and spent eight years teaching reading and writing to teenagers and adults in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Push was her first novel, and it reflected what she observed and experienced during those years. But Daniels's perseverance and his impressive work as producer of Monster's Ball and director of Shadowboxer eventually won her over: "Lee had a vision for adapting Push, and he also had the ability to put that vision in motion." As the film claimed its second Audience Award, this time at the Toronto Film Festival in September, there was no doubt that the vision had been realized and would affect a global audience powerfully. regular $10.00