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One of the most celebrated British directors of his generation, Mike Leigh has made a career out of bringing deeply personal, human stories to the big screen, with his best project being his 1996 family drama Secrets & Lies.

The film stars the brilliant Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a successful black doctor who was adopted as a child and now seeks to trace her origins. In the process, she learns that her birth mother (Brenda Blethyn) is a white woman with a dysfunctional family who all seem to be hiding something.

A moving portrait of family discord and identity, Secrets & Lies makes splendid use of its ensemble cast to create a naturalistic, relatable series of character interactions and tragic plot twists.

Leigh is a director best known for writing his script after thinking of an idea and casting the characters, and with Secrets & Lies it's clear that unorthodox process has paid off beautifully, crafting a painfully honest tale of loss and family that is crushingly human.