Her birth mother, Cynthia, is a single, white, working-class woman, who lives in a tumbledown apartment with her rude daughter, Roxanne.
Hortense is an educated black woman, living an elegant life in a fancy neighborhood in London. The film is significant for what it avoids, as well as for what it didn’t feel necessary to state - that blackness refers to a clearly defined kind of identity. Instead, the movie focuses on the way these human beings relate to each other in a broader sense. Of course, there’s much drama to be extracted from this revelation, and the result is a pleasantly surprising film that avoids low-hanging racial themes that other films on similar topics would likely pounce on.
“Secrets & Lies” stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a young black professional who, following the death of her adoptive parents, decides to track down her biological mother, whom she later discovers is a white woman - and the matriarch of a family in total chaos. Stream of the Day: Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘A Little Princess’ Is the Best Cinematic Version of Burnett’s Fairy Tale World