Third runner-up for the Audience Award at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival, BILLY ELLIOT is a feel-good film which tantalizes with the question: what it would be like if you combine the manly fortitude of boxing with the grace and delicacy of ballet?

Billy is an eleven-year-old growing up in Northern England. While his coal miner father and brother are on strike, Billy maintains family tradition by donning his grandfather's old boxing gloves, and begins to take lessons at the local gym which also serves as a ballet school. After a few boxing lessons, Billy realizes that his feet move more swiftly than his hands and finally gives in to the ballet teacher Mrs. Wilkinson's (Julie Walters) recommendation that he join her class. Against his father's scornful opposition, Bill continues his ballet classes under Mrs. Wilkinson's watchful eye and discovers that he possesses a promising talent for dance. She begins to prepare the buy for the Royal Ballet School's entrance audition but all may be for naught if Billy's father continues to withhold his consent which would allow his son to travel to London for the audition.

It is a glowing, inspirational film which explores how the trappings of family bias and tradition threaten a boy's hope of escape from an impoverished, grim existence.