SFFILM to Screen Mike Leigh’s ‘Hard Truths’ with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Person

Today, SFFILM announced a special early screening of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths starring Academy Award-nominated actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste joining for an onstage conversation. The event will take place at the historic Roxie Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 20 at 7 pm.

“SFFILM has a long and proud history with Mike Leigh,” said SFFILM’s Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks. “In 1986, the San Francisco International Film Festival hosted the first US retrospective of his work, and in 2008, he was honored with SFFILM’s Irving M. Levin Award for Film Direction. We are thrilled to now present a sneak peek of his latest film Hard Truths with the star Marianne Jean-Baptiste returning to join us in-person. This film is a quintessential Leigh film, but it only works because of Jean-Baptiste’s tremendously raw performance. It’s a tour de force piece of acting and is a spellbinding follow up to their first collaboration in Secrets and Lies.”

7-time Oscar-nominated 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.

Tickets will go on sale for SFFILM members on Thursday, October 31 at 10 am at sffilm.org. The online box office will open to the general public on Friday, November 1 at 10 am. Ticket prices for General Admission programs are $20, and $16 for SFFILM Members. Senior, student, and ADA are $19, and Children 14 and under are $11.

Ticket Packs are the most flexible way to see SFFILM events at a discount, and may be redeemed for any regular, non-rush screening or event priced up to $25. 6-Packs are $115 for General, and $95 for SFFILM Members. 10-Packs are $175 for General, and $145 for SFFILM Members.