Sometimes a movie becomes more than a movie; it turns into a movement. That’s what has happened to Precious. It began in January, when its director, Lee Daniels, took a cellphone call from Oprah Winfrey as he was getting up to accept the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Oprah told him his movie “split her open” and offered to throw her weight behind it. Precious went on to win the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and is generating massive Oscar buzz. It’s this year’s Slumdog Millionaire, another underdog drama of an abused ghetto child with showbiz dreams trying to overcome enormous odds. But Precious, the harrowing tale of a 350-lb. Harlem teen who’s impregnated for the second time by her father, makes Slumdog look like a Disney movie. No movie heroine has ever grappled with more issues at once: she’s black, poor, obese, abused, illiterate, unloved, pregnant and HIV positive.

Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, Precious is fiction. But as the movie morphs into a cause, its inspirational message has become inseparable from the real-life personalities behind it, who have embraced the film as a healing touchstone to their own childhood horrors of sexual or physical abuse. That includes Sapphire, Daniels—and the two iconic moguls who signed on to the film after its premiere, Winfrey and Tyler Perry. But no one incarnates the horror of abuse more vividly than Mo’Nique, the 41-year-old powerhouse who portrays the monstrous mother of the film’s teenage heroine. The actress says she drew directly on her own experience of suffering four years of abuse from her brother, starting at age seven. The director told her to “be a monster,” she told the New York Times. “And my brother was that monster to me. That’s who I became.” Continue…