Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunite for Hard Truths

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh worked together on 1996’s Secrets & Lies. They are now back together with Hard Truths.

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated SECRETS AND LIES, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her easy going younger sister, played by Michele Austin (ANOTHER YEAR), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their clashing temperaments – brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This expansive film from a master dramatist takes us into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.

directed by Mike Leigh, the film stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown & Jonathan Livingstone.

Hard Truths opens in US cinemas on 6th December 2024.