I was a migrant working in a warehouse. Then I got a role in a film about doing exactly that

Louis Utieyin was working six days a week, waking up at 4am, as a picker in a warehouse.

He despised the work but it led him to a role in On Falling, a film made Ken Loach’s production company Sixteen Films. It centres on a Portuguese worker grappling with the loneliness and relentlessness of her life as a warehouse worker in Scotland.

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“I think it’s an accurate representation of being an immigrant,” says Utieyin, who is Nigerian but grew up in Italy. He moved to Scotland to study at the University of Stirling in 2017. “You’re just trying to get by. It’s that sense of alienation. That is the reality of being an immigrant.”

Utieyin’s family were unable to help him financially, so he had to work to support himself alongside his university studies.

“I’m a creative person and I felt like I was forcing myself to work for survival. I was in survival mode the entire time,” the 25-year-old says. It was while scrolling through social media that he stumbled upon a casting call for On Falling, the directorial debut by Laura Carreira released in March 2025.

The film stars Joana Santos as Aurora, whose days are spent picking products from endless shelves and being monitored by a beeping barcode scanner before she returns to a soulless flatshare.

“The film was going for realism, and I think it captures the feeling very well. People want you to go through this work because it makes profit. It’s a commentary on the fact that we give more than our time. Nobody necessarily knows your name. Your personal being is stripped away. You feel like you are replaceable as hell. You’re paying for this big machine,” Utieyin says.

Filmmakers are increasingly casting people with lived experience to bring their projects to life. Sing Sing(2023) starred men who were former members of the prison theatre group on which the film is based. It received three nominations in this year’s Academy Awards, including a best supporting actor nomination for Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin, who played a fictionalised version of himself.

Similarly, director Sean Baker cast strippers and exotic dancers in his best picture winner Anora, a film about a young sex worker who meets and marries the son of a Russian oligarch.

Utieyin feels that casting people with lived experience is why films such as these – and On Falling –resonate. 

“Why would they cast a rich person?” he asks. “It was necessary that people came from this experience. You don’t want to watch a movie and feel like: ‘This person would never spend a day in here.’”

Still, despite the focus on the harshness of warehouse work, Utieyin was keen to encourage moments of light in the film. Improvisation was welcomed, especially from cast members with experience as migrant workers or in distribution centres.

A comedian, who goes by the stage name Kinz Luiz, Utieyin finds fun in even the bleakest of times while working in the warehouse. “It was miserable, but it wasn’t always soul-crushing. There were moments of fun and laughter, and we needed to show that too,” he says.

Utieyin is hoping to be a filmmaker himself one day – although his films will look quite different to realist drama On Falling. He is currently living in Glasgow and working on a short film about a man who summons a demon on dating app Grindr. His films often blend comedy and horror, with a focus on the queer experience.

He does not want to be trapped in meaningless work that defines Aurora’s existence in On Falling. He wants to pursue creativity and to find joy in work, rather than to work to survive.

“I don’t have dreams,” Utieyin admits with a laugh. “I’m just vibing.”

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