Secrets & Lies

Secrets & Lies (1996) is Mike Leigh's British drama you can watch online on iFILM. Hortense, a young black optometrist in London, buries her adoptive mother and decides to track down the woman who once gave her up.

The trail leads to Cynthia, a frayed, lonely factory worker, a white woman who had all but forgotten the child existed. Their first meeting, a long and excruciatingly awkward scene in a café that slowly thaws, carries the whole film. Around Cynthia sits a web of things left unsaid: her daughter Roxanne, who can barely stand her; her brother Maurice, a wedding photographer, and his wife Monica, living in polite estrangement. A family barbecue thrown for a birthday becomes the place where years of buried truth finally spill out.

Leigh built the picture through his usual months of improvisation with the actors, which is why the dialogue lands like something overheard. Brenda Blethyn and Marianne Jean-Baptiste both earned Oscar nominations, and the film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Stream Secrets & Lies (1996) online on iFILM.