Description: Billy, the 11-year-old son of an English mining family, stumbles onto a ballet class held in the same community center as his boxing lessons. Billy's family is under tremendous strain. His mother has just died. Billy's grandmother has a tendency to wander off and cannot take care of herself. Billy's father, a miner of limited education, and his older brother, are walking the picket lines during the violent and unsuccessful 1984 British miner's strike. There is little money. Billy's father doesn't approve of boys taking ballet, while Billy finds that he would rather dance than do anything else. Will Billy pursue his dream? Will the beleaguered Elliot family pull together and heal?

Benefits: This warmhearted story shows children the rewards of perseverance in following their own star despite parental or popular opinion. It demonstrates the redemptive agency of love in a family under enormous stress and shows a father coming through as a parent after some egregious errors. The film illuminates the tensions and sorrows of a family dealing with the loss of its wife and mother while the grandmother gently sinks into senility. (Billy lovingly takes care of his grandmother.) In this film, a friendship between two boys survives the fact that one is homosexual and the other is not. Billy Elliot also illustrates the far reaching influence that a dedicated teacher can have on a child's development.

The family's struggle is set against the background of the 1984 English coal miner's strike in which the British government, determined to drastically reform the country's bloated and inefficient coal industry, crushed the miner's union, and changed English society. The film reveals the sacrifices required of striking union workers and their families, as well as the anguish of a community whose way of life is doomed in the face of new economic conditions.