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The transient space of Scotland’s gig economy provides the backdrop for Laura Carreira’s accomplished debut feature. By tackling big themes of isolation and the gig economy in an intimate way, she submerges us within them rather than simply showing them to us. The enormous fulfilment warehouse where Portuguese migrant Aurora (Joana Santos) works is not a destination job for her or most who work there. It’s just a place that pays the bills until something better comes along. And better doesn’t mean a lot - for example, the friend who car-shares with her dreams of a job where she can sit down.

Despite the number of workers there, Carreira also shows it to be a surprisingly solitary space. Aurora walks the aisles as a picker, selecting items to be shipped to customers accompanied only by the bleep of her handheld computer as it instructs her about her day or becomes.

On Falling director Laura Carreira: 'It was influenced by the idea of things being transitory. She is surrounded by people even though she’s lonely' Photo: Sixteen Films

Laura Carreira's On Falling charts the loney life of a Portuguese warehouse picker (Joana Santos) in a Scottish fulfilment warehouse. The result is a thoughtful character study that highlights the pressures of the modern working environment, particularly for those in the gig economy. The film shared the Silver Shell for Best Director at San Sebastian (with Pedro Martín-Calero's The Wailing) and went on to win the Sutherland Award for best first film at London Film Festival. This week it had its Scottish premiere at Glasgow Film Festival and it will be on release across the UK from Friday, courtesy of Conic. In the first part of our interview, Carreira told us about her concerns that the gig economy is "consuming us". In the second part,...

"When you're not at work, what sort of things do you like to do?" Letterboxd has debuted the full official UK trailer for an indie film titled On Falling, the feature directorial debut of Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira. This premiered at TIFF 2024 last year, and also played at the London, San Sebastian, Thessaloniki, and Rome Film Festivals. it focuses on Aurora, a Portuguese worker in a Scottish warehouse, navigating loneliness and alienation in an algorithm-driven gig economy as she seeks meaning and connection amidst solitude and workplace confines. The film stars Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora, Jake McGarry, and Neil Leiper. This received mostly positive reviews. It's described as "social cinema that is worthwhile" that's a "clear, cold, tender, merciless and, above all, unforgettable film." Fits right alongside Ken Loach's films; the poster states it's from the same producers as I, Daniel Blake & The Old Oak anyway. Take a look.

Palestinian director Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays has won the Golden Alexander-Theo Angelopoulos prize for best film at the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, which ran from October 31-November 10.

The family drama centring on an Arab-speaking Israeli family premiered earlier this year in Venice’s Horizons strand, winning best screenplay. Copti had previously won the best film and screenplay prizes at Thessaloniki in 2009 for his Academy Award nominated Ajami.

The Silver Alexander for best director went to Belgian Leonardo van Dijl for his debut feature Julie Keeps Quiet, winner of the Sacd award in Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar.

The jury of the international competition,...

Happy Holidays, the latest feature from Palestinian Filmmaker Scandar Copti, has taken the top prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece.

Copti’s film won the Best Feature Film Award, which comes with a 10,000-euro cash prize. Awarding the prize, the jury, headed by Sara Driver, praised the film for “intricately weaving different narratives and perspectives that fully expose the complexity of national, gender and class dynamics that can divide societies and for seeing the future in the face of a young woman the Golden Alexander goes to Happy Holidays by Scandar Copti.”

Happy Holidays debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The story open after a minor accident sets off a chain of events, unraveling lies and unspoken truths that sow division within a multifaceted patriarchal society.

The festival’s Best Director Award, which comes with a 5,000-euro cash prize, was picked up Leonardo Van Dijl for Julie Keeps Quiet.

Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti’s Israel-set family drama “Happy Holidays” won the top prize Sunday at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, taking home the Golden Alexander for best feature film.

Copti’s sophomore feature, his first film since his Oscar-nominated 2009 debut “Ajami,” premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons sidebar, winning the best screenplay prize. Variety’s Siddhant Adlakha described it as “a piercing, realistic family drama, the inflection points of which reveal deep cultural and political dimensions surrounding gender and ethnicity.”

“Happy Holidays” follows four interconnected characters who share their unique realities, highlighting the complexities between genders, generations and cultures. The ensemble cast — comprised of Arab and Jewish characters alike — creates a multifaceted portrait of life in Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city.

The Thessaloniki jury, which included filmmaker and producer Sara Driver (“Boom for Real”), filmmaker Denis Côté (“Vic + Flo Saw a Bear”) and producer Konstantinos Kontovrakis (“How to Have Sex...

The humming machines and beeping scanners fill the cavernous warehouse as Aurora makes her rounds, hunting items from an endless checklist. As a “picker” at a vast fulfillment center somewhere in Scotland, her days pass in a blur of repetitive motions under the watchful eye of an automated system that monitors her every move. Outside of these gray walls, her lonely existence continues in an austere flat shared with transient workers like herself, strangers who drift in and out but never linger.

Burrowing into Aurora’s solitary routine is Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira with her outstanding debut feature, On Falling. Produced by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films, the film immerses us in Aurora’s weary world to shine a light on the immense human cost concealed within the sleek packaging and brisk transactions of online shopping.

Carreira, who hails from Edinburgh originally, directs with an assured yet tender touch; her...

It’s easy to divorce the online purchases that arrive so swiftly and conveniently on your doorstep from the individual labor that got them there: The packaging is so uniform, the buying process so entirely impersonal, that it’s tempting to believe they were somehow selected and delivered by robotic magic. But in many cases, someone hand-picked the item from an intricately coded shelf in a vast, airless warehouse, just as someone else had the unrewarding zero-hours job of driving it to your home, or carrying out how many intermediate menial stages in between. Where Ken Loach’s recent “Sorry We Missed You” shed light on the loneliness of the long-suffering delivery driver, Laura Carreira’s remarkable “On Falling” turns warehouse-picking from an ignorable abstract process into a human routine of vivid, slowly erosive despair.

Any comparison to Loach is backed by the film’s DNA, as Jack Thomas-o’Brien, son...

This year’s San Sebastian Film Festival Official Competition was a strong one, featuring veteran filmmakers including Albert Serra - who ultimately took the top prize Golden Shell for his documentary Afternoons Of Solitude - Mike Leigh and François Ozon. There was room for new voices, too, including that of Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira, whose debut feature On Falling charts a handful of days in the life of a lonely migrant warehouse picker working in Scotland. The film, which stars Joana Santos as Aurora, a woman who struggles to find connections after relocating from her homeland to Edinburgh, won the Silver Shell for best director at the festival. We caught up with Edinburgh-based Carreira in Spain to chat about expanding on ideas from her short films, including The Shift, living precariously and...

Laura Carreira’s impressive debut drama sees a quietly excellent Joana Santos endure dehumanising work conditions while looking for a way out

The human cost of the online convenience shopping revolution is, arguably, still to be properly addressed in cinema or any other art form. Chloé Zhao’s 2020 Oscar winner Nomadland was, rightly or wrongly, criticised in some quarters for going easy on working conditions in the Amazon warehouse where she was allowed to film. This outstanding debut feature from the Scotland-based Portuguese film-maker Laura Carreira returns us to the subject, reminding us that the business of choosing items in the gigantic and ironically named “fulfilment centre” is not done by robots, but stressed human beings with the Steinbeckian job description of “pickers”, rushing along vast warehouse shelves, their work rate ruthlessly assessed by digital handsets.

It does not look as if Carreira has shot in a real warehouse, but...

The modern workplace is the focus of Laura Carreira’s hypnotic debut On Falling, a sobering study of a woman’s attempt to stay afloat in contemporary Glasgow. Produced by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films production company, it has plenty in common with the British social realist’s output and specifically his more recent films, notably his state-of-the-nation trilogy (2016-23) that comprised I, Daniel Blake, Sorry We Missed You and The Old Oak. Carreira, however, brings a subtle but assured lyricism to the subject that has already caught the attention of festival programmers worldwide: after debuting in the Discovery strand at the Toronto Film Festival, her film On Falling now competes in the official selection at San Sebastian and will soon enter the First Feature Competition at the London Film Festival.

Like Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, the subject is the gig economy, but this time from the point...

This debut feature from Portuguese director, Laura Carreira, produced by the company Ken Loach co-founded, Sixteen Films, is far better than anything living-political-legend Loach made during the final innings of his career. Using a social realism that is all the more powerful for its restraint, Carreira avoids wild swings and contrived speeches, and trusts the audience to be swept up by a devastating performance of a woman being hollowed out from within by inhumane working conditions.

We are dropped in with Aurora (Joana Santos) as she shows up to work as a packer at a Scottish factory. Carreira has a docu-realistic eye for setting and a dramatist’s instinct for pacing and mood. The pitter-patter of workers footsteps, the squeaking of a metal turnstile gate, the beeping of Aurora’s scanner — a tool of her trade — form a rhythm so that there is an assured quality that marks the film...

At long last, we now have at least one festival premiere set for one of our most-anticipated films of the year. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path, a remake of his superb, bad-vibes 1998 thriller that stars Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric, Ko Shibasaki, and Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, is now set for a premiere as part of San Sebastián Film Festival’s Official Selection.

Taking place September 20-28, the lineup also features the latest from Edward Berger, Gia Coppola, Costa-Gavras, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Diego Lerman, Joshua Oppenheimer, and François Ozon. While we could see Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path pop up at other fall fests, it’s exciting to know it’s finally seeing the light of day.

Check out the full lineup below.

Bound In Heaven

Xin Huo (China)

Country(ies) of production: China

Cast: Ni Ni, You Zhou

This film narrates the poignant tale of a...

The UK industry gathered at the Cannes UK pavilion yesterday (May 16) to celebrate the work of the eight projects taking part in this year’s Cannes Great 8 showcase.

Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down starring Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott, Sean Dunn’s The Fall Of Sir Douglas Weatherford and Marianne Elliott’s The Salt Path were among the eight titles taking part, with filmmakers taking to the stage to discuss their projects.

Scroll down to see the full line-up

The only documentary in this year’s line-up is Witches, from Elizabeth Sankey, in which the filmmaker explores the unexpected connections...

Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down starring Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott, Sean Dunn’s The Fall Of Sir Douglas Weatherford and Marianne Elliott’s The Salt Path, featuring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, are among the eight films taking part in the Great 8 showcase, which presents new UK feature films from first-and second-time UK filmmakers to international distributors and festival programmers.

Now in its seventh year, the 2024 Great 8 showcase is funded and produced by the BFI and the British Council, with support from the Great Britain & Northern Ireland campaign, BBC Film and Film4.

In preparation for Cannes, unseen footage from...

French sales outfit Goodfellas has added Laura Carreira’s debut feature On Falling to its European Film Market (EFM) line-up.

The drama tells the story of a Portuguese warehouse picker working in Scotland. Trapped between the confines of her workplace and the solitude of her flatshare, she seeks to resist the loneliness, alienation and ensuing small talk which begin to threaten her sense of self.

Keeping alive Loach and Sixteen Films’ tradition, the cast features a mixture of actors and non-actors. Portuguese actor Joana Santos leads the cast, which features Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora, Jake McGarry and Neil Leiper.

It...