If they made a movie of your life, it’d be pretty boring, right?
You, like me, like most other people, live mundane and monotonous lives largely spent at work. You could have an incredibly exciting job, but it’s still the same kind of excitement on a loop. Which is why, even though it takes up a huge chunk of our time, it’s rarely the focus of a film.
Writer and director Laura Carreira took that as motivation.
“Cinema avoids looking at work,” she says, “and I think it usually comes from it being narratively not the most interesting, especially if it is repetitive. How much is a day in a job going to change this character’s life? You avoid looking at it because you don’t think it’s interesting enough as a filmmaker. And I wanted to challenge myself to do it.
“Work is so normalised,” she continues. “We work our entire lives and we don’t question why. And, you know, I have the suspicion we don’t have to work as much and get paid as little. There’s an irrationality in the way we’re living and I find it baffling that we don’t talk about it more often.
“Films can be used to escape your life. But we should maybe look at why we’re trying to escape life so often.”
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Carreira’s debut film On Falling is released this week, so escape from your own life and immerse yourself in that of Aurora, a Portuguese migrant, played with quietness and resolve by Joana Santos, who works in a fulfilment centre that is anything but fulfilling.
Her days are spent picking products – including a surprising number of dildos – from endless shelves with a beeping barcode scanner as an ever-present reminder that performance is constantly being monitored and measured.
The film is intense in its intimacy. It was supported by Ken Loach’s production company Sixteen Films, but is no simple diatribe against the algorithm-driven gig economy, more how never-ending shifts and financial vulnerability can shape identity and erode a sense of self.
Inspiration came from Carreira’s own experiences. She moved from Portugal to Edinburgh to study film aged 18 and was introduced to the world of work via various hospitality and care worker shifts.
“It was just that shock of how little you were paid, and actually in my second job, I later found out, I wasn’t even being paid minimum wage. My life immediately got consumed. Even a simple thing like meeting a friend all of a sudden became this big complication where people had different shifts. It really made my horizon a little less exciting.”
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Aurora struggles to make ends meet, but the poverty she seems to feel even more acutely is a poverty of purpose and connection as she struggles to socialise with colleagues or those she shares a flat with.
“Money limits the amount of choices you have, the time you have and what you can do with it,” Carreira says.
“If you don’t have money to interact with society in a way that leaves you with some agency, then you isolate yourself and it will be harder to make connections with other people. The film is about scarcity, not just financial but of experience, of meaning as well. If you need a job to pay your bills then that sense of vulnerability is universal. In this particular job, the dynamic is more grotesque but anyone who needs to work for a living is experiencing it.”
Joana Santos as Aurora in On Falling
There’s a wonderful, wholly relatable visual metaphor in the film, when the camera captures a package tumbling down a conveyor belt, but because the belt is moving it stays in the same place, constantly, inescapably falling.
The warehouse where much of the film is set is a remarkable combination of five or six different locations, with some subtle CGI to create a dominating scale. For research, Carreira went on a tour that the Amazon fulfilment centre runs at their base in Dunfermline.
“Something felt strange about the tour,” she says. “I did it with families. It was parents wanting to show kids where their parcels come from. I wasn’t expecting the corridors to be as narrow and dark and so that influenced the aesthetic of the film.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
“It’s not an image that a lot of people have in their minds when they order a parcel and have the promise of it arriving the next day. They think this efficiency is coming from high tech and cool innovation, when actually it’s people rushing to the item. And they’re getting paid very little while these companies are making incredible profits.”
She also spoke to actual pickers to get insights into their lives.
“Those conversations influenced the film a lot. I remember I asked someone what they did outside of work, because to me it was important to understand people’s lives outside of that job, and I got the answer: ‘I do the laundry.’ That went straight into the film.
“Then other details, like the dildos that we see throughout the film. Almost every picker would talk about that. So I thought, OK, this needs to be part of the film. Even if I don’t quite understand how it dramatically relates.
Carreira adds: “People were saying they were prepared for the job to be physically demanding, having to be on your feet 10 hours a day. But I think a lot of them weren’t prepared for just how psychologically challenging the job was as well.
“Being on your own for that many hours, following this scanner that is counting the seconds until the next item, that pressure.”
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
There is plenty of talk about how AI and more automation could take the place of people’s jobs. But On Falling demonstrates that more fundamental damage is already being done.
“I like the idea that with automation we can remove jobs that are repetitive and not interesting to do so it frees us to do other things. I find that very exciting, but it can’t be done at the expense of people’s lives,” Carreira says. “People in these jobs are being expected to work like robots. But people are still cheaper than robots and for as long as that’s the case and we do our own maintenance, we’ll keep getting the jobs.”
Carreira says again that the film is not about a specific industry or about trying to change our behaviour. She remembers that talking to pickers who also depend on being able to order online deliveries.
“What’s really important to me is removing this sense of looking within to fix the problem,” she explains. “We’re told that if you’re experiencing poverty, then, how exactly do you spend your money? If you’re experiencing mental health issues, well, there’s therapy, you can go for a walk.
“There are all these symptoms and the solutions always seem to be focused on the individual. I hope the film invites us to look at the way we’re living as the place to look for answers as to why we’re feeling this way.”
On Falling is in cinemas now.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
