SECRETS & LIES

With unexpected startling spontaneity and gripping emotional realism, SECRETS & LIES crafts an intricate, richly human exploration of the buried tensions and heartaches that run beneath the surface of 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 director Mike 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. The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life.

"This is exactly the challenge taken up by Leigh: bring film back to its community calling and remember that, beyond the confusion of images and identities, there are people with pasts, sufferings, things to say, families -- and we are all part of it." - Noël Herpe, Positif