In a serendipitous set of circumstances, I was talking to Jack Thomas O’Brien last week, the Sixteen Films (Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien) producer behind Laura Carreria’s debut feature On Falling. We were discussing how A Rabbit’s Foot should profile the film’s writer-director Laura Carreira, before remembering that I was travelling to Edinburgh, her hometown, just a few days later. I checked the forecast—eighteen degrees and sunny—before arranging to meet Carreira in Leith. 

Originally from Porto, Laura moved to Scotland after studying film at the Edinburgh College of Art. Her first short film Red Hill won the New Visions Award at the 73rd Edinburgh International Film Festival. Her second short film The Shift premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020 and was nominated for the European Film Awards. Both films inspired On Falling, her debut feature, which was made with the support of the BFI, BBC Films, Screen Scotland, ICA and Goodfellas. The film world premiered at Toronto, along with in competition at San Sebastian where she won the Silver Shell for Best Director. The film had its UK festival launch at London Film Festival, where it won the Sutherland Award for Best Debut and is currently in cinemas across the UK.  So far Carreira has an undeniably seamless track record. Her films are honest, uncompromising and beautifully sewn together, with a maturity that is impressive for a filmmaker this early on in their career. She has a second feature in development with Sixteen and Film4. 

On Falling is a quiet yet urgent drama about the exploitation of warehouse ‘pickers’. Carreira’s protagonist is Aurora, a young woman from Portugal working as a picker in Scotland. The conditions are harsh, the days long and the pay low, with Aurora living in basic shared housing. 

The Portuguese Joana Santos, best known for her soap-work, plays this young woman on the verge of breaking down and in search of both human connection and a better life. It succeeds as a film about loneliness and Carreira directs Santos impeccably, brilliantly capturing Aurora’s need for human connection.  Aurora puts her head on her Polish flatmate’s shoulder in a red hued bar. When a stranger finds her alone in a park after a distressing job interview, she clutches onto him. Her hands clenching tightly are captured in close-up by the film’s cinematographer Karl Kürten. 

At work, Aurora is rewarded by her manager for her nimble picking with a chocolate bar from a box on his desk, as if she were a school child instead of a grown woman. A group of school children are brought in to look at the pickers on a school trip as if they were animals in a zoo. One of their co-workers is said to have slit his throat. Without being sensationalist, Carreira’s film is unflinching social realism and a reminder that consumerist appetites are at the expense of those working in fulfilment centres. 

There is beauty amongst the brutalness too. The power of human connection and kindness of strangers is effervescent, keeping Aurora moving even after things have got too much. There is a glimmer of hope in the end that Aurora is on the path towards a better life. On Falling does not answer questions but asks them and Carreira is quickly establishing herself as an auteur in the making, on a mission to speak the truth, with an eye for subjects often overlooked in films.   

In sun-dappled Leith, she spoke to Issy Carr about her journey to it, the influences of the Dardenne Brothers and Chantal Akerman and why she knits to switch off.

Issy Carr: Talk us through your journey from short films to your debut feature 

Laura Carreira: My first short Red Hill and second short The Shift were both sort of looking at the world we see in my feature. In The Shift, I looked at the gig economy and I felt like On Falling was also going to look at that but then I discovered factory picking. It felt so strange that there is an actual person rushing after an item and I felt there was a good way of bringing that to screen. 

IC: How did you infiltrate yourself into that world? 

LC: I started by asking friends if they knew pickers and then realised that there were so many people out there I could talk to. I started conducting interviews and a lot of these stories became like a collage of observations that people were telling me. And then obviously, I also realised a lot of pickers were migrant workers, which made me realise I could bring in my own experiences. When I was working in Scotland for the first two years I was mainly working with other migrants too. 

IC: Was there anyone specific you based Aurora on?

LC: I think the character is a combination and collage of everything I learned from the interviews. In the film we don’t actually get to know a lot about Aurora. Even towards almost the end of the film when she shares that her favourite colour is blue it feels so late in the film that we’re finding out a little something about her. So I think that was also part of what was interesting to me, trying not overdevelop the character, so to give space for there to be many different Auroras. I don’t think she was based on anyone, if anything, she is the closest to me, because, as a writer you can’t help but write a lot of your own self into a main character. 

IC: How did you find your incredible lead actress Joana Santos? 

LC: We (Lara Manvaring and I) did a big, big casting call. We received around 600 tapes from Portugal just to try and find her. I think we were maybe halfway through when I saw the first self-tape of Joana but I immediately thought she could be Aurora.  But we still watched all the others too! 

IC: Her performance is exceptional.

LC: Yeah, she really manages to get into the interior life of the character. I knew my actor needed to do this because the script really didn’t have the dialogue for the character to open up about how she’s feeling, so I knew it was going to have to come from the silences in her presence. Also, Jonna manages to be really shy and quiet, but also so transparent. As an audience member, you can read what she’s thinking and what she’s going through. 

IC: Are you a director who likes to rehearse—what is your process before shooting? 

LC: Yes. We did a lot of rehearsals with Joana. I tried to rehearse with almost every single actor that had dialogue, because we also worked with a lot of non-actors and I think sometimes when you write a script, there’s a risk of every character sounding like the writer. And so during rehearsals it was so helpful to work out which dialogue I had written that didn’t work for the actors and then rewrite it with them. And people would come up with the best stuff. Some of the things I now most like in the film sometimes are entire bits of dialogue I didn’t construct. For example, you know the manager that tries to talk to her about his dog? I had completely different dialogue written for him, but it was the first time he had been in a film and when we came to rehearse it, I could feel that that dialogue wasn’t working for him and so sort of challenged him to be like, what would you like to talk about? And he was like, oh, I have a new dog. We’re like, that’s wonderful, bring it. So he shows actually the photo of his actual dog. It was just so funny and I was like, I would never come up with that. So it’s good to like, yeah, it also keeps the rehearsal process a bit more collaborative. It brings other people into the process of making the film, otherwise it’s just me bossing people around, which is really not what I want to do. 

IC: Could you talk a bit about the shoot. How long was it? 

LC: 25 days. There wasn’t a lot of time to improvise during the shoot, so a lot of that exploration happened in rehearsal. On set, we were a lot more focused on getting the shot. I don’t like to do a lot of coverage, so we choose the shot we want, then we do take, take and take until we get it. 

IC: Which filmmakers are a big influence on your work? 

LC: I started studying film when I was 15, so I feel like there have been many that influenced me over the years. John Cassavetes was the first. I watched his films and was like, whoa, they are incredible. Then later, the Dardenne Brothers and Ken Loach, so then my taste became more social realist. Which I think you see in the film and Ken Loach’s company produced it. I was interested in making documentary at university so think was very influenced by that. Mainly through observational documentaries, just characters doing their day-to-day and how much there is there already with that. I am still finding lots of influences—Chantal Akerman also had a huge impact and we tried to bring that visually to the film. Obviously I am still watching films, still discovering filmmakers. 

IC: What movies have you loved this year?

LC: Vermiglio, Flow and All We Imagine As Light. 

IC: Did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker before you started working in film?

LC: I thought I wanted to be an actress. So my parents put me in acting classes when I was very little. But I think it was this sort of childish thought, seeing films in a movie theatre and thinking the people that are playing the roles are the people that are making it. And then as a teenager, very quickly, I was like, oh, I want nothing to do with a stage or a camera pointed at me. Absolutely not. So then I think I realised what interested me was telling the stories, writing the stories. And then the moment I discovered, like, John Cassavetes, and other European filmmakers, it was huge. I was like, wow, a film can be this. This is so cool. And then, yeah, just kind of started looking around me, seeing kind of films everywhere and wanting to tell those stories. Also in Lisbon, where I was studying, there was this amazing place called Cinemateca.  It’s a public cinemateca and they do constant retrospectives, which is where I discovered a lot of work. Like Jean-Luc Godard was the first filmmaker whose work I saw there and the tickets were so cheap! Because I was a film student it was like a euro to see any film I wanted, so that was my real education.  And then from then on, you discover one filmmaker, and that opens up doors to many others, and you just, yeah, it’s been kind of non-stop since then. 

IC: And outside of making and watching films, what do you love doing? 

LC: Lately I do a lot of knitting, so that’s my new hobby. I’ve only started it recently, actually and I really enjoy it. I am making a vest right now for a friend’s baby. I am working hard to get it done before the baby is born! I am also halfway through a jumper that I am trying to do but jumpers are a lot of work. 

IC: What film project are you working on now?  

LC: I’m writing. It’s a film that is still going to be about work, but this time I’m going to look at the dynamics of the world of office. 

IC: Can you tell us more?

LC: It’s about a character that has a sort of bullshit job and it’s kind of how she’s coping in the corporate world. She has a nine-to-five, but she doesn’t quite understand what the job entails. She doesn’t seem to do anything that she understands. So I think it’s about that performance of work. I think we are always working a lot and there is a lot of work out there that maybe doesn’t need to exist. There is this book written by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. He wrote an article years ago and then it sort of went viral and that led him to write the book. And then also quite a few surveys were commissioned to look at this. I think it was something like in the UK 37% of people reported to believe that if they stopped doing their job no one would notice. 

On Falling is out now in UK cinemas.