Writer and Director: Laura Carreira
The tour guide at the warehouse where Aurora works describes her picking job as a fun treasure hunt but for the people who have to do it every day, their lives are filled with small tragedy, an endless cycle of work and isolation where no one can properly see them. Laura Carreira’s debut film On Falling, part of the First Feature Competition at the BFI London Film Festival 2024 is a quiet gem, a subtly told story that hints at immigration, workers rights, exploitation, domestic poverty and the death of aspiration. There are flashier, sparklier films at the Festival, but few display the sensitivity to the reality of working class lives.
Warehouse picker Aurora spends her days in a fulfilment centre diligently finding customer orders ready to ship. Shifts are long and laborious with limited colleague interaction. At night she goes back to a single room in a shared facility living with others just like her and when a Polish white van driver moves in, hopes of friendship emerge when he tries to include Aurora in his activities.
Staged in three primary locations, On Falling draws out the routines of manual jobs focusing on the warehouse, the canteen connections with co-workers and the flatshare living arrangements, and each only serves to emphasise Aurora’s urban loneliness, places where there is only a superficial and surface-level conversation about what to eat, television series and what people did at the weekend. Carreira’s protagonist aches for true connection but is continually on the outside, shown through Carreira’s camera work and Joana Santos’ muted but powerful performance that keeps her isolated and feeling awkward even in a group setting where the events of Aurora’s limited life leave her with nothing to share.
There is real power in Carreira’s subtly and without drawing attention to it, we see how the accidental cost of fixing her smartphone screen leaves her without money for lunch or dinner for days. It is so slight a shift you might miss it, but the single chocolate bar she has for lunch or the cheese sandwich she eats days after she originally made days before, indicate the tiny living wage she is paid. When her next wage slip comes in, it’s happy days again with soup and exciting cakes, and it is this kind of observational storytelling that makes On Falling such a powerful and unassuming presence at the Festival.
The enduring fortitude that Aurora shows is a credit to Santos’ gentle performance, neither reacting too deeply to the many lows or the occasional highs. There are no tears which is incredibly restrained, giving this performance a deeper meaning, a character beyond self-pity and even beyond hope, knowing that every day will be like the one before. All of that is matched by the slow burn sense of degradation, of it becoming harder for Santos’ Aurora to stay afloat and a moving final sections shows just how dislocated she has become.
Another strong competition contender in a tough category, Carreira’s ability to hold the line on the film’s premise, not to take On Falling to a place that is too maudlin or too obvious is impressive and while some may find its plotless style a little overlong, Carreira finds considerable pathos in the unchanging everyday reality for Aurora and others.
On Falling is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
