Precious
An abused, illiterate Harlem teenager pregnant by her father finds a way toward a self through an alternative school and the teacher who believes in her.
Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award 2009 won
Precious is a sixteen year old girl in 1980s Harlem, pregnant for the second time by her father and abused by her mother, who is sent to an alternative school where a patient teacher begins to reach her. Between the brutality of home and the fantasies she escapes into, she slowly finds words, literacy and the first sense of a life of her own.
The film shows dissociation and fantasy working as survival against incest and maternal cruelty, and the fragile emergence of a self given room to exist. It offers a therapist a study of resilience without sentimentality. It won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance in 2009 and is based on the novel Push by Sapphire.
Details
- 2009
- United States
- English
- Film