Clio Barnard is the only high-profile UK filmmaker selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning in Directors’ Fortnight.
Clio Barnard is back at Cannes with her fifth feature, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which premieres in Directors’ Fortnight. It marks the UK filmmaker’s return to feature films after a foray into TV with Apple TV’s The Essex Serpent and BBC’s Sherwood. She has previously played at the festival with Ali & Ava in Directors’ Fortnight in 2021, while The Selfish Giant won the Europa Cinemas Label in 2013.
The drama follows five lifelong friends from Birmingham and shot in the West Midlands city and London in March 2025. Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Lola Petticrew, Jay Lycurgo and Daryl McCormack play the group as they grapple with turning 30, relationship hurdles and the horrors of a national housing crisis amid a famine of affordable homes.
Barnard’s longstanding producer partner Tracy O’Riordan produces for her UK-based Moonspun Films, with backing from BBC Film, BFI and US firm TPC. Curzon Film is distributing in UK-Ireland, while Charades is selling. Ireland’s Enda Walsh wrote the script from Birmingham author Keiran Goddard’s novel.
Walsh approached you directly to direct his script, which he wrote in 2024. Were you on the lookout for a politically charged feature such as this for your next film?
I wasn’t really looking for a project at that point. Enda’s email came out of the blue. He’s a brilliant writer, I love his work [which includes Small Things Like These and Die My Love], and was thrilled to get an email from him. I read the book shortly before it was published [February 2024] and it really spoke to me. It was an easy decision, and I loved the political intent wrapped up into the characters.
Part of your filmmaking process involves immersion in the communities you’re spotlighting. How did that work for this film?
Keiran’s brother Tom was incredibly helpful to us. He introduced us to The Crown, a social club in Birmingham. The strength of community that the film and Keiran’s novel talks about was embodied in that place. That wasn’t a contrivance, it happened very naturally. It became our production base — we had meetings there, we did rehearsals there, we had crew lunches there, we did castings there.
The people who go to The Crown and the bar staff were all in the film. There’s a particular group of people that run it, who are kind of community social workers, not in any official sense, but a real locus for people to go to, and a massive support. We hung out there all the time. Anthony and Daryl did a lot of nights out with people they’d met there, who then ended up being in the film.
Shaheen Baig did the casting. How involved were you in that process?
I’ve worked with her lots of times before: she’s got such an amazing instinct for who is going to be right for a role, work how I like to work and be collaborative.
The five of them were fantastic. I didn’t know Anthony and Lola had gone out with each other when they were teenagers — that was happenstance.
The film opens with a scene of collapsing blocks of flats. What message are you hoping to portray?
The collapsing tower alludes to precarity around the economy. It’s symbolic of a broken promise.
I found Keiran’s dedication at the end of the novel incredibly moving — “To public luxury, which is the only luxury that matters” — which is why we put it at the end of the film. It’s about housing and how fucked up that is, and how it makes for an incredibly precarious economy and for incredibly precarious lives.
What would you like the impact of the film to be?
I hope there is a sense of [people] being seen and heard. I hope that as well as a recognition or anger or mourning, there is also something joyful within the characters.
What are you doing next?
I’m back in telly land [season three of Sherwood began shooting in January]. I would like to be back in film land. I have an idea about what the next project will be, but I need to get a little bit further down the line before I can talk about it.
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