Mike Leigh Re-Teams With ‘Secrets & Lies’ Star Marianne Jean-Baptiste on ‘Hard Truths’

Mike Leigh’s hotly-anticipated, but super-secretive, new film will see the iconoclastic British director reunite with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Hard Truths is Leigh’s first film since 2018’s Peterloo and will co-star frequent Leigh collaborator Michele Austin (Another Year, Secrets & Lies). After Peterloo and 2014’s Mr. Turner, both period dramas, Hard Truths will see Leigh return to the modern day, with a drama described as “a tough but compassionate intimate study of family life.”

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Other Leigh regulars returning for Hard Truths include producer Georgina Lowe, cinematographer Dick Pope, costume designer Jacqueline Durran, production designer Suzie Davis, composer Gary Yershon and casting director Nina Gold.

Secrets & Lies, which premiered in Cannes in 1996, winning the Palme d’Or, featured Jean-Baptiste as a well-off Black professional who seeks out her biological mother, a poor white factory worker living in East London, played by Brenda Blethyn. Jean-Baptiste was Oscar-nominated for her performance, and it marked her international breakthrough. She has since pursued a career on both sides of the Atlantic, with a starring role in the long-running CBS procedural Without a Trace, and turns in such features as Spy Game, the 2014 RoboCop reboot, and Jeymes Samuel’s biblical satire The Book of Clarence this year.

Bleecker Street pre-bought Hard Truths and will release the film theatrically in the U.S. later this year. Studiocanal is releasing the movie in the U.K., while Cornerstone Films is handling international sales. Co-financed by Film4, Hard Truths is a Thin Man Films and The Mediapro Studio co-production, made in association with Creativity Media.

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