HARD TRUTHS
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 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. 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. (UK, Spain 2024, 97
mins, R, English | Dir. Mike Leigh)

