Yes! Yes! Yes! Adding already to it’s big wins at Sundance and Cannes, Precious took home the “Cadillac People’s Choice Award” at the Toronto International Film Festival, making it a shoe in for a best picture nomination at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards. Award buzz aside we here at TMS are more excited about the raw portrayal of the intersections of poverty and abuse that plague far too many children, particularly those in Black and Brown communities. Trust me…I’ve spent my fair share of time in foster, group homes, and residential treatment facilities to tell you how these issues impact the psychosocial development and more importantly, shape the global outlook of a child. To use the term “troubled” is an understatement.
Lee Daniels and Gabourey Sidibe at Sundance
TMS appreciates films that are personal to the artist and in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, ‘Precious’ director, Lee Daniels explains the passion behind the project:
“When I reflect on it, on why I did this movie, it has a lot to do with my youth, what I witnessed, and that girl who came to my door at 3 o’clock on a summer afternoon when I was 11,” he says. “But it also has to do with the food I was eating, the pork, the chitlins, the cockroaches on the walls, the mice we’d throw bread at, it’s a combination of all that was.”
The girl was a 7-year-old neighbor named Angie and the moment was a seminal one for the director. Daniels remembers opening the door of their West Philly apartment to find this already morbidly overweight child, naked, crying, trying to cover herself with her hands, bloody welts raised on her back and arms by an electrical cord. The memory was profound, the words, “Mommy beat me,” haunted him, that and the fear he saw in his own mother’s eyes. “I remember my mother on her knees in the corner praying, and me thinking, ‘Where’s God?’ “
When, years later, he read “Push,” those images, long suppressed, rose up. “The book evoked the same feelings — I could smell every scent, I could see the texture of the walls, I was shaking. Shaking. It was like family, I knew it intimately, but I didn’t know whether I wanted the story told.”
Can’t wait to see this one. I’ve already got at least 3 Siggy’s waiting to crown it with. ‘Precious hits theaters in November. Peep the official trailer below.
