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Joseph Ezekiel Strick (July 6, 1923 – June 1, 2010) was an American director, producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned experimental documentary, literary adaptation, and narrative feature filmmaking. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick served as a cameraman in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II before beginning his filmmaking career with the short Muscle Beach (1948), co-directed with Irving Lerner. He later collaborated with Lerner, Ben Maddow, and Sidney Meyers on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959), which won the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award. Strick went on to direct film adaptations of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1967) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977), as well as Tropic of Cancer and Never Cry Wolf (1983). His documentary short Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1970) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. In addition to his filmmaking work, Strick was active as an entrepreneur in technology ventures and worked in theatre in Britain, directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. His moving image collection, comprising more than one hundred items, is held by the Academy Film Archive, which has preserved several of his films. He died in Paris, France, in 2010.
The life of 11-year-old Billy Elliot, a coal miner's son in Northern England, is forever changed one day when he stumbles upon a ballet class during his weekly boxing lesson. Before long, he finds himself in dance, demonstrating the kind of raw talent seldom seen by the class' exacting instructor, Mrs. Wilkinson. With a tart tongue and a never-ending stream of cigarettes in her hand, Mrs. Wilkinson's zest for teaching is revived when she sees Billy's potential.
