Among contemporary British directors, Clio Barnard seems to have made the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight her own: her latest feature, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, joins her past acclaimed works The Selfish Giant and Ali & Ava in premiering there (see the news). An ensemble drama with a working-class setting, like the majority of her films – this time Birmingham, in the West Midlands – it was adapted from Kieran Goddard’s novel by the prolific Enda Walsh (Die My Love and many acclaimed plays) and was produced by Tracy O’Riordan, of Moonspun Films, Barnard’s regular producer. Further backing comes from the BFI, BBC Film, TPC and Curzon Film. Charades represents its international sales, and it’s one of many titles of theirs dotting this year’s festival.

Anthony Boyle (Masters of the Air), Joe Cole (A Prayer Before Dawn), Jay Lycurgo (Steve), Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) and Lola Petticrew (She Said) make up the principal cast, incarnating a group of childhood friends now facing various adult troubles. Once, they played together, skipped school together and dreamed of the lives they would have one day. Now they’re 30, and the future they imagined is slipping quietly out of reach. With Barnard’s fine-arts background, her films always have very aesthetically pleasing, if not too prettified, visuals, and DoP Simon Tindall should maintain this in his first collaboration with the director. Editor Maya Maffiola and composer Harry Escott also return from her last feature, Ali & Ava.

Funded by leading UK arts organisation Artangel, it was 2010’s The Arbor that really put Barnard on the map, helping popularise the verbatim technique in non-fiction for its innovative study of the troubled British playwright Andrea Dunbar. The film won the BFI London Film Festival’s prestigious Sutherland Award and was nominated for a BAFTA. Following Ali & Ava’s delayed pandemic-era launch, Barnard directed the entirety of The Essex Serpent, a series adaptation of Sarah Perry’s popular novel, and some episodes of the BBC crime-drama Sherwood, but admirers of her past work and of British auteur cinema will welcome her new feature landing again on the Croisette.