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Hadrian's wall, Culloden, the poll tax, Jacob Rees-Mogg: yes, England has inflicted an awful lot of angst and pain on Scotland down the centuries – but, look, we still don't want you to leave

1 Sorry for calling every last one of you "Jock". We now know it's offensive, especially if you're a woman.

2 So sorry for the years of heartless Conservative governments that you never voted for that ripped the heart out of the Scottish mining, steel and shipbuilding industries, butchered public services and imposed an unwonted, dismal neo-liberal ethos on a land to which such a callous political and economic philosophy was inimical.

3 And for making you guinea pigs for Margaret Thatcher's disastrous poll tax, inflicting it on you a year before England and Wales, and then – somehow! – forgetting to backdate the rebate for the tax when it was abolished in the early 90s.

4 Sorry for the 1746 Dress Act that banned tartan,...

She's one of the few women competing at Cannes this year – and with her first feature. Alicia Duffy tells Maddy Costa about her lucky breaks, on-set rows and why Virginia Woolf is an inspiration

Here's a familiar story: a female director, with a clutch of prize-winning short films to her name, has her first feature selected for screening at Cannes. It happened to Lynne Ramsay, whose debut Ratcatcher was shown in 1999, three years after she won the Jury prize for her short Small Deaths. It happened to Andrea Arnold, who won the Jury prize for Red Road, and again in 2009 for Fish Tank. Now it's the turn of Alicia Duffy, whose debut feature, All Good Children, has been selected for the Director's Fortnight.

Like Arnold, who was an actor and TV presenter before switching to directing in her 30s, Duffy, now 38, was a latecomer to cinema. She tried everything from opera singing to advanced maths,...