Secrets & Lies is a 1996 British film directed by Mike Leigh and starring Brenda Blethyn, who won the award for Best Actress at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. The film won numerous other awards, including the Palme d'Or, and received five Academy Award nominations. The film tells the story of Hortense Cumberbatch, a successful black optometrist, who is adopted and has chosen to trace her family history and discovers that her birth mother, Cynthia Purley, is a working class, 'downwardly immobile', white woman. She also meets her and later meets Cynthia's brother, Maurice Purley, a... photographer, and his wife Monica, and Cynthia's daughter Roxanne, a street cleaner. After being warned by public officials about the troubles Hortense could face by tracking her birthmother down, she continues her investigation and is baffled to learn that her birth mother is white but does not resent her and wants to know more about her own past. At the Purley's it is evident that severe tensions exist between Roxanne and her mother. Both are frustrated with one another and getting on one another's nerves. Maurice and Monica also experience domestic tensions.
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| Release date: | May 1996 |
| Directed by: | Mike Leigh |
| Rated: |  |
| Runtime: | 142 Minutes |
| Producer: | Simon Channing-Williams |
| Editor: | Jon Gregory |
| Music by: | Andrew Dickson |
| Cinematography: | Dick Pope |
| Screenplay by: | Mike Leigh |
| Estimated budget: | $4,500,000 |
| Genre: | Comedy |