Life is Precious / You Are Precious
This movie is going to make me weep. And cringe with my whole body.
Sapphire was a guest the year that I was president of the Barnard/Columbia Rape Crisis Center, the year PUSH was published. The book was so controversial, the life of Precious was so dire, people didn’t want to believe that children, just 15 blocks North of Columbia University were living that kind of life. Incest, poverty, illiteracy, abuse. On our little student budget we took Sapphire to dinner. She was funny, gracious and warm, and pretty damn irreverent, too.
I was in shock when I heard PUSH was optioned and created into a film, let alone a film that won at Sundance. This story is fucking brutal. I thought no one wanted to see movies about rape? That’s what I was told! Maybe we are finally ready?
But with the free pass Roman Polanski is getting… makes me wonder.
I saw a few minutes of this at an IFP conference this past spring. It looked really well done. I haven’t read the book and so can’t comment on whether or not it was representing it well but it definitely looked like they were telling a powerful story with the film. Just the few minutes that were shown (during a Q&A with director Lee Daniels) were pretty intense.
[...] official. Hollywood is holding its breathe for the premiere of “Precious“. Gossip, speculation, excitement, buzz… How many Oscars will it catch? Is it [...]