There are few places better suited to showing the overlap between social and financial precarity than an e-commerce warehouse. In On Falling [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Laura Carreira
ficha de la película], Portuguese migrant Aurora (Joana Santos) is barely making ends meet week after week, somewhere in Scotland. Director Laura Carreira makes a remarkable calling card for future fame with her debut feature, which comes on the heels of her acclaimed shorts The Shift and Red Hill. We spoke to Carreira after her feature screened in Discovery at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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Cineuropa: How did you decide to tell this particular story of labour and precarity through the eyes of a woman?
Laura Carreira: It’s probably because of my own perspective. I think a lot of it was influenced by my first few years in Scotland [after immigrating]. The period of my first job there influenced me a lot and changed the way I saw the world. I think I’m still making films to process that time. Then I guess that when I started to research the distribution logistics industry, which is rife with job insecurity, I realised how many new workers there are – migrants, refugees, asylum seekers. So, it felt interesting to approach that kind of job through someone who is a migrant because that’s an experience that I could relate to.

My own first job as a migrant was in hospitality – not in a warehouse, but it still felt very alienating. In On Falling, there are only transitional spaces that feel like non-spaces: warehouses and migrant housing, where there’s transience and a lack of belonging. Can you speak about those themes and how they make their way into your scriptwriting?
I interviewed a lot of people who did the job of a picker to understand their day-to-day experiences. One recurring theme was how difficult it was to form connections, both outside of work and in the workplace. They knew people, but they didn't have enough time to really get to know them. Maybe some of the pain we feel today might stem from us not creating [or not being able to create] enough time to care for each other, and to fulfil our lives in different ways.

When you're writing and filming, how do you strike that balance between emotional containment and evoking empathy?
So much of the film is about what goes unsaid and bubbles beneath the surface. For example, regarding all of the conversations that Aurora has, I wanted to focus on them as being small talk because how you perceive them reveals a lot about you, if you can't form a connection with someone else. It’s really hard to strike up a conversation in the space of five minutes. Or at least one that would be meaningful enough to allow you to call the other person a “friend”. Aurora is such a shy character and has a sort of performance anxiety in interactions. I think it’s because these daily chats with people are so important that she freezes. So to me, it felt important to show that even free time isn’t really free.

How did you work on it with your lead, Joana Santos?
With Joana, our work was mainly on creating that sense of awkwardness and intensity, so that even something as mundane as small talk would become [and feel] heightened. Because it’s visible that she has so much longing to connect and to be with others, that when given the opportunity, she freezes. I think it was my way of trying to portray loneliness in a sensorial way.

Because of its subjective point of view, On Falling feels intense to watch, but it’s also subtle. Is subtlety actually important for you as a way of expressing or creating emotional resonance?
Yes, and I think it also comes from the [protagonist’s] point of view. I’ve noticed that, maybe a bit like Aurora, I am kind of hyper-vigilant as well, in my own life. It helps me pick up on things that [maybe only] I see as relevant, but they speak to a certain perspective. Cinema allows for that perspective. So to me, it was interesting to try to put these elements into a film. For example, a lot of the conversations I had with pickers during my research guided some of the dialogue. The line about the laundry – that was a direct line that someone said to me when I asked them what they do outside of work. They kind of struggled to answer and said, “I mainly do the laundry.” And that, to me, was quite telling. And then, of course, there’s the experience and the point of view of someone who has come from another country. When you're arriving in a place you don’t know, you’re more susceptible to looking around and trying to make sense of the world around you.