Laura Carreira’s feature debut On Falling consolidated its festival trajectory at the 38th European Film Awards, where the Portuguese-born, UK-based filmmaker won the European Discovery – Prix FIPRESCI.
The British-Portuguese co-production, starring Joana Santos as a migrant warehouse worker in Scotland, has already collected a Silver Shell for Best Director at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Sutherland Award at the BFI London Film Festival, and multiple BAFTA Scotland awards.
In conversation with Screen Anarchy, Carreira stressed that research was not preparatory but constitutive of the writing process. “A lot of the research happened during the writing, because I really needed to understand what the day-to-day is like, not just the work itself, but also life outside of work,” she said.
Many of the stories she collected from warehouse pickers entered the film directly, sometimes in unexpectedly literal ways. She cited, for instance, the now-discussed detail of workers repeatedly handling sex toys. “Almost everyone mentioned the sheer amount of dildos they had to pick up,” she recalled. “At the time, I didn’t really know how that detail was going to relate to the film I was making… I just knew it belonged.”
Dialogue also emerged from testimony. A passing line in which Aurora mentions doing laundry after work came verbatim from a worker’s description of their off-hours routine. For Carreira, it encapsulated how labour extends beyond the shift itself. “You’re so exhausted that your life becomes preparation for the next working day,” she noted.
The director has openly acknowledged the structural parallel between the precarity she was depicting and her own position as a first-time filmmaker. “Filmmaking is also deeply insecure and precarious,” she said. Entering the industry, she held multiple jobs; making On Falling required leaving the one that paid her bills. Even now, post-recognition, she admits to questioning sustainability: “Honestly, I don’t know how people do it unless they have disposable income or family support. I really don’t know.”
The warehouse setting originated in what she described as a shock of recognition. Like many consumers, she had rarely considered the infrastructure behind next-day delivery. “These companies talk so much about technological innovation and efficiency,” she observed, “but when I actually saw it, it was people running to pick up items. It’s human labor, but it’s invisible.”
The vast aisles, ordered in what appears to be chaos, operate under scanner-imposed precision. Workers are directed “down to the second,” she explained, leaving “no agency, even in the physical effort.” That coexistence of disorder and hyper-control felt, in her words, “very representative of the world we live in today.”
Although Aurora interacts with dozens of people -- Carreira later realised the character speaks to around 55 individuals -- the film articulates a loneliness. “I thought I was making a film about loneliness, and it turns out she’s surrounded by people,” Carreira reflected. The problem, she suggested, lies in the quality of connection. Staff-room conversations never deepen, exhaustion forecloses intimacy.
Aurora’s repeated attention to her phone was conceived as a gesture of longing: “It’s about wanting to reach out, wanting connection, with the phone as the only window.” When it breaks, the rupture is acute. “We’re all so attached to something that’s supposed to connect us, but physically it’s just us looking down, alone.”
Migration became central once Carreira began speaking to pickers and realised how many were economic migrants. Having moved to the UK at age 18, she immediately recognised the overlap with her own experience. “Migrants are part of this invisible labor that we talk about but don’t see,” she said, adding that Brexit-era rhetoric intensified the urgency. Making Aurora Portuguese allowed her to draw on what she described as an authority rooted in reality, the instability of early years abroad, shared flats, economic fragility.
The film was produced by Sixteen Films, long associated with Ken Loach, whose approach to research resonated with Carreira’s own. She described Loach as “a big support, especially in terms of research,” noting that his method of learning from actual experience before translating it to screen aligned closely with her practice. The company backed formal decisions that might have deterred others: working with non-actors, shooting in operational locations, and structuring parts of the shoot close to story order.
Carreira revealed the warehouse environment in On Falling was shot across multiple real sites, not built as a unified location. Because the team couldn’t access (and didn’t want to partner with) the biggest companies, they worked around the industry’s monopoly by filming in “about five different warehouses,” capturing different elements in each and then stitching those spaces together through editing.
The approach created what she described as “a collage,” assembled in postproduction from real working environments rather than a single controlled facility. Logistically, she noted, it meant constantly adapting to operational schedules; in some places, the art department would move in right after workers finished, dress the space, and the crew would shoot only hours later, while discreet VFX helped extend scale when needed.
The director identified the scanning sequences as particularly demanding, given the need to coordinate pace, performance and focus while maintaining realism. “The camera had to move as fast as the worker,” she explained, describing the technical choreography required.
Editing proved the most psychologically taxing stage. “I gave everything during the shoot, and by the time we reached editing, I was completely depleted,” she admitted. The misconception that completion of the cut would mark the end of her involvement quickly dissolved. “I kept saying goodbye to the film, thinking I was done, and then being pulled back in.”
Casting Aurora involved reviewing approximately 600 submissions, including non-professional performers. Carreira insisted on watching every self-tape. Joana Santos distinguished herself through what the director described as immediate interiority: “She could be quiet, and you could read so much in her face.” For a film structured around repetition and micro-shifts of expression, that quality was decisive.
Carreira situates her work within the European social realist tradition that first inspired her as a teenager, particularly the films of the Dardenne brothers. At the same time, she remains wary of fatalism.
The title On Falling emerged during development and immediately resonated. “The idea of falling, collapse, instability, process, felt like something that tied everything together,” she explained. The final image, in which Aurora falls in a park but is helped up, crystallised the distinction. “She falls, but she’s helped up. She doesn’t stay down. I didn’t want the title to feel completely defeatist.”
Carreira’s debut suggests a recalibration of European social realism for an algorithmically managed economy. Where earlier traditions centred overt conflict, On Falling locates tension in compliance, repetition and muted endurance. The result is a film that understands labour not as an event but as an environment, a continuous architecture shaping bodies, tempo and self-perception.
Cover image courtesy of © 38th European Film Awards Berlin 2026, Iris Wang.