The Help (2011)

           This movie is a dramatization of the best-selling book of the same title written by Kathryn Stockett. The story shines a harsh light on the overt racism in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s (where Stockett was born and raised). Aibileen is a black maid who is raising her seventeenth white child. Skeeter is a young college graduate who aspires to be a writer rather than to participate in the ladies' bridge clubs and fund raisers. In fact, she convinces Aibileen, her fellow maid Minny, and eventually many other maids to tell what it really feels like to endure the hypocrisies and humiliations of working as a maid — like carrying for the kids every day but not being trusted enough to polish the silver, or being prohibited from using the same bathroom. The whites are outraged by the book while the black maids find power and liberation in telling the truth through their own stories. Parts of this movie are painful to watch, other parts are just petty and despicable. But that's what life was like back then and there.