Cannes: five to watch

Alicia Duffy Having previously shown her short films at Cannes, this British director's debut feature All Good Children, based on Sam Taylor's novel The Republic of Trees , screens in the Director's Fortnight sidebar. Set in the French countryside, it's a heady, poetic tale of summer love between an Irish boy on a farm and a young English girl in a nearby chateau. The film is the first production from Caveman Films, co-founded by the actor Andy Serkis to champion new British talent. Lucy Walker British documentary maker and NYU graduate Lucy Walker has won audience awards at Sundance and Berlin (twice) and now makes her Cannes debut with Countdown to Zero , which examines current global attitudes to nuclear weapons. Screening out of competition, it's produced by Lawrence Bender who, apart from being Tarantino's regular collaborator, guided Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to an Oscar after it premiered in a similar slot at Cannes. Hannah Murray Best known as troubled Cassie in the Channel 4 show Skins , Hannah Murray has her first major movie role in Chatroom . A British-made horror film, it is written by Ireland's Enda Walsh ( Hunger ) and directed by Japanese horror maestro Hideo Nakata ( Ring, Dark Water ). Aaron Johnson and Imogen Poots round out an attractive young British cast. Abbas Kiarostami The highly respected Iranian auteur must be a favourite to join the elite band of double winners of the Palme d'Or. He won for Taste of Cherry in 1997 and his latest, Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), is a two-hander starring French icon Juliette Binoche as a gallery owner in a Tuscan village who meets an English lecturer, played by opera singer William Shimell. Jez Butterworth As his West End hit Jerusalem heads to Broadway, British writer Jez Butterworth comes to Cannes with his first screenplay since 2001's Birthday Girl . The American political thriller Fair Game is directed by Doug Liman ( Bourne Identity , Swingers ), and reunites Sean Penn and Naomi Watts – after 21 Grams – as CIA agent Valerie Plame and her journalist husband Joseph Wilson. Butterworth co-wrote with his brother John.