Cannes Directors’ Fortnight has served some compensation for a scant presence of U.K. filmmakers in major sections at those year’s festival, awarding the highest profile among them, Clio Barnard, the section’s only official prize: the Directors’ Fortnight People Choice Award – an effective Audience Award – for “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.”
In a second award announced Thursday Cannes evening, this time from a Directors’ Fortnight partner, “Shana,” the first feature as a solo director from France’s Lila Pinell, scored the Coup de Cœur des Auteurs prize, from France’s rights collection society SACD.
A BAFTA-nominated writer-director behind multi-prized British indie films such as “The Selfish Giant,” “Dark River” and “Ali & Ava,” Barnard’s fifth feature is adapted by “Die My Love” and “Hunger” writer Enda Walsh from Keiran Goddard’s eponymous novel. It turns on five childhood friends in Birmingham: Patrick, Shiv, Rian, Oli, and Conor played together, who skipped school together and dreamt of the lives they would have one day.
Now they’re thirty, however, and they face divided destines and most of them ever more limited futures. The film features a notable ensemble cast, led by Anthony Boyle (“Say Nothing”), Joe Cole (“Gangs of London”), Jay Lycurgo (“Steve”), Daryl McCormack (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”) and Lola Petticrew (“Say Nothing,” “She Said”).
