Hard Truths

Synopsis

For his 23rd film, legendary British filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the stark domestic dramas he’s known for, like his 1971 feature debut Bleak Moments (a ChicagoIFF Gold Hugo winner) and his blistering, Cannes-winning 1993 breakthrough Naked. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since his 1996 multiple Oscar nominee 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. In stark contrast, Pansy’s easygoing younger sister Michele is a single mother whose family life and hair salon are brimming with warmth.

Fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous, Hard Truths 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.