Among the most-anticipated films on the fall festival circuit is the long-awaited return from Mike Leigh with Hard Truths. Marking a reunion with Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, it’s the British filmmaker’s first contemporary work in nearly fifteen years. Ahead of a TIFF world premiere this Friday, followed by a stop at NYFF and one-week qualifying run on December 6th, then nationwide release on January 10th from Bleecker Street, the first trailer and poster have arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “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 & 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 easygoing 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.”
See the trailer and poster below for the film starring David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, and Jonathan Livingstone.
