Billy Elliot

Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot opened in 2000 and won the BAFTA for Best British Film, three Academy Award nominations including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (Lee Hall). The film launched Daldry, a London theatre director making his feature debut, into the Hollywood prestige system; he would go on to The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008). Hall would go on to write the multi-award-winning stage musical adaptation, which has now run for two decades.

1984, County Durham. Eleven-year-old Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell, in a star-making debut after his ballet training) is the son of a striking miner during the year-long pit strike against the Thatcher government's coal-industry restructuring. Sent to boxing lessons to follow his father into traditional working-class masculinity, he sneaks instead into the ballet class held in the same hall, where Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters) recognises his talent and begins to coach him in secret. Gary Lewis is unforgettable as Billy's exhausted father; Jamie Draven plays his older brother, on the picket line.

The film operates simultaneously as period social drama (the 1984-85 strike at its most consequential), Bildungsroman, and meditation on the cost of one young person's escape from the trajectory their community had assumed for them. Bell, fourteen at the time of release, won the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role, among the youngest ever recipients in the category. Lee Hall, who had begun his career in radio drama, went on to write the book and lyrics for the 2005 stage musical adaptation with Elton John, which ran in the West End for over a decade and on Broadway for three years.