#666 - Mike Leigh on Naked

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from 2022 with the great British filmmaker Mike Leigh as he discusses his 1993 film: the NYFF31 selection Naked. Mike Leigh returns to the New York Film Festival with his final film, Tender Loving Care, at the 64th New York Film Festival this September and October. Secure your seats with an NYFF64 Pass at filmlinc.org/passes

The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives.