‘To succeed meant to leave’: inside the jolting film about Brummie estate kids knocked flying by demolition — SkimNews
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- Keiran Goddard's second novel, set around a Birmingham tower block coming down, has been adapted into the ensemble film I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, with a script by Enda Walsh and direction by Clio Barnard, opening in UK cinemas December 4.
- The drama tracks five childhood friends split by the estate's demolition — including Rian (Peaky Blinders' Joe Cole), a stock-market success now investing in the new apartment complex on the old estate's site, and Patrick, a zero-hours delivery driver who argues housing is a basic human right.
- The film premiered at Cannes to international critical acclaim and earned a five-star Guardian review from Peter Bradshaw, though Barnard concedes it may be 'among the last of a dying breed' of impassioned old-school social realism amid a glut of studio sequels.
- Production filmed on location in Birmingham, with Goddard's brother Tom integrating the crew with the community; an open casting call drew 800 local people and The Crown social club served as the project's base of operations.
- Goddard describes himself as a product of Blair-era social mobility — Birmingham to Oxford to London — but says 'to succeed meant to leave' and feels 'splintered,' arguing economic precarity once confined to working-class communities is now 'creeping more into middle-class society' and so demand for these stories is growing.
- Barnard frames the film's antagonist as 'the system' rather than any individual, drawing on her previous work on Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar (The Arbor) and the scrap-metal coming-of-age drama The Selfish Giant to position the film as political rage tempered by shared jokes and 'hard-won optimism.'
Why it matters: Goddard puts a market contradiction to commissioning editors: if the most-lived lives are the least depicted on screen, that's economically 'stupid' — and his pitch that middle-class audiences now want these stories because the same precarity has reached them reframes social-realism as a growth category rather than a niche. For distributors, the film is also positioned as a potential artifact of a fading tradition, with Barnard herself conceding it may rank among the last of its kind.
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