Includes a post-film conversation and award presentation to our 2024 Excellence in Acting Award honoree Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The conversation will be moderated and recorded live by Richard Lawson and Rebecca Ford of Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast. 

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and 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 (Michele Austin) is a single mother with a life as different as their clashing temperaments — one 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: Even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is an acclaimed actress, writer, and composer known for British dramas and hard-hitting American police procedurals. For seven years, she was seen on Without A Trace opposite Anthony LaPaglia and was featured in the hit drama Broadchurch, playing a role written especially for her by the show’s writer and creator, Chris Chibnall. Jean-Baptiste has also graced the stages of the Royal National Theatre and Shakespeare in the Park, is an accomplished musician, and made her directorial debut with the 2010 short film Ink, which she also penned.

Jean-Baptiste received Academy Award, Golden Globe, and British Academy Award nominations for her riveting performance in Mike Leigh's 1996 film, Secrets & Lies. Jean-Baptiste and Leigh’s history of collaboration has been decades-long; they first worked together on his theatrical show A Great Big Shame and, in her work as a writer and composer, Jean-Baptiste also wrote the score for Leigh's feature film Career Girls. Now, Jean-Baptiste and Leigh have reunited for their upcoming feature Hard Truths, an exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses.

Courtesy of Bleecker Street Media

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