UK / Portugal • Drama • Year: 2024 • Running time: 104 mins
Languages: English / Portuguese
Audience Response: 14 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’; 5 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 5 votes
- ‘Good’: 4 vote
- ‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Read the comments here or visit the “On Falling” discussion page to join in the conversation.
Synopsis:
On Falling tells the story of Aurora, a Portuguese warehouse picker working in a vast fulfilment centre in Scotland. Trapped between the confines of her workplace and the solitude of her flatshare, Aurora seeks to resist the loneliness, alienation and ensuing small talk which begin to threaten her sense of self. Set against a landscape dominated by an algorithm-driven gig economy, designed to keep us apart, the film explores the silent, vital struggle to find meaning and connection.
On Falling shows us a world of sadness and exhaustion, a kind of heavy cloud cover of depression that is both a symptom of the job and a way of getting through it… This is a very impressive debut.
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
Director/Writer: Laura Carreira
Main Cast:
| Joana Santos | Aurora |
| Neil Leiper | Ben |
| Inês Vaz | Vera |
| Piotr Sikora | Kris |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the On Falling pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
Film Notes
The human cost of the online convenience shopping revolution is, arguably, still to be properly addressed in cinema, or any other art form. Or maybe the ‘revolution’ is actually over and we might possibly begin to see a post-revolution resistance movement developing soon? The high-street as a place for shopping is dead. We use it now to drink coffee (with a pastry?), or maybe do a bit of ‘work’ on the laptop? Discuss!
The 2020 Oscar winner Nomadland was, rightly or wrongly, criticised in some quarters for going easy on working conditions in the Amazon warehouse where the director was allowed to film. Scotland-based Portuguese film-maker Laura Carreira’s film On Falling returns us to 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. (Echos of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, whose company Sixteen Films also produced this film).
Portuguese film star Joana Santos gives an excellent performance as Aurora, an exploited worker at one of these so-called “fulfilment centres’, getting a lift to and from work with a Portuguese colleague, being gently reminded to contribute to the petrol. There are rewards for Aurora: a chocolate bar which the manager beamingly tells her to choose from a box on his desk.
Aurora is on the edge: always hard-up, hungry and suffering from unrequited love. When she finally decides to change course and seek alternative employment she experiences a crisis of identity, forcing her to look inward and inspect her life. And maybe it is not too late.
At the end of this film there will be an opportunity for the audience to stay behind and discuss the season’s films and the future of the club. Meet in the Cafeteria area.