English Department Calendar

Winner of the Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, SECRETS & LIES (1996) is a British drama written and directed by Mike Leigh. The film stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste (who won the best actress award at Cannes) as Hortense, a well-educated black optometrist who was adopted at birth and is searching for her birth-mother now that she is a successful adult. Hortense is both confused and surprised when she discovers her birth mother, Cynthia (played by Brenda Blethyn), is a working-class white woman with a dysfunctional family who denies Hortense is her biological daughter.