Secrets & Lies

Mike Leigh

Leigh cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life with this story of Cynthia, a working-class white woman whose personal life is transformed when she discovers that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior.

DIRECTOR
Mike Leigh
YEAR
1996
COUNTRY
UK, France
RUNTIME
142 minutes
START DATE
December 7, 2024

Introduction by Marianne Jean-Baptiste on December 7

The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives. An NYFF34 selection. A Janus Films release.

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