Screenwriter: Mike Leigh

Producer: Simon Channing Williams

Nominated for five Oscars — including Best Picture — this incisive and engaging comedy-drama from writer-director Mike Leigh explores the difficulties of human connection and the cost of burying painful truths. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a black doctor working in London, who decides to seek out her biological mother and is stunned to learn that she’s a working-class white woman named Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). Hortense tentatively reaches out to learn the truth about her parentage, but Cynthia’s own life is a disaster — she has a difficult relationship with her other daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), and is mostly estranged from her more successful brother (Timothy Spall) and his snobbish wife (Phyllis Logan). One of the great triumphs of ‘90s indie cinema, Secrets & Lies serves as a fascinating example of Leigh’s unique filmmaking style, in which characters and scenes are honed over a process of months of improvisation to capture something powerfully authentic.

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Accessibility Options: Amplified Audio, please see the box office for devices.