SECRETS AND LIES is a 1996 film by Mike Leigh that, appropriately enough, is concerned with the things that members of a family conceal from each other.

Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a black woman in London who has made a successful career as an optician, knew from a young age that she was adopted, but only after her adopted mother's death does she decide to look up her birth mother. Hortense is shocked to find that it is Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), not just white but living in near-poverty and wallowing in regret. Cynthia has a tumultuous relationship with her acknowledged daughter Roxan... read the rest.