Pride is the kind of movie that is best seen without knowing its storyline going in. Because it delivers something quite different than you expect, based on the kind of movie it seems to be.
Even if you do know the plot (which deals with the coal-miners strike that tore Great Britain apart in the mid-1980s and much more), you still have to see it to believe it. Director Matthew Warchus (primarily known for theater work such as God of Carnage and Art) tells a multi-character story based on actual events that manages to be funny, touching, enraging and otherwise demanding a viewer's emotional response.
It starts with those strikes in Great Britain in 1984, in protest of Margaret Thatcher's attempts to close coal mines and lay off miners. Even as the miners are striking, members of the London gay community decide, after that year's gay pride parade, that they will support the miners and start raising money for their strike fund. When their efforts to donate the money to the union itself are ignored (because of who the donation is coming from), the group's leader, Mark (Ben Schnetzer), rallies his troops and picks one mining village in Wales to whom they'll take their support in person.
The miners at first are nonplussed at the idea of being in the same room as actual gay people: "I've never met anyone who was gay," one local says, to which Mark replies, "That you know of."
This review continues on my website.