'On Falling' - Laura Carreira’s haunting debut on modern work to screen in Tipperary

A striking new drama that explores the loneliness of modern work and the quiet struggle for connection will be screened at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, at 8pm on November 12.

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On Falling, the debut feature from Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira, who now lives in Scotland, has been described as an arresting study of the human cost of contemporary labour. The film is a co-production between the UK and Portugal and runs for 104 minutes.

Often compared to the social realism of Ken Loach, On Falling bears the mark of Sixteen Films, Loach’s production company, which appears in the credits. Yet Carreira’s work takes the genre somewhere darker and more disquieting. Drawing on her research into online retail, she creates a setting that feels at once familiar and faintly dystopian, where the boundaries between routine employment and dehumanising control blur uncomfortably.

At the film’s heart is Aurora, played by Joana Santos, a Portuguese immigrant employed as a warehouse picker in a Scottish city. Her world is shaped by barcode scanners, shift targets and digital directives that seem to appear from nowhere. Even the simple act of requesting a day off is managed through an app. Carreira observes this with quiet precision, revealing how technology can strip away agency and intimacy, leaving workers disconnected from both colleagues and themselves.

The atmosphere of isolation is deepened by the wintry setting and by Aurora’s solitary routines. Her life is one of small, repetitive gestures — pushing trolleys down endless aisles, returning to a shared house where human warmth is fleeting. Her most constant relationship seems to be with her smartphone, a fragile link to something resembling connection.

Carreira’s filmmaking is marked by restraint and empathy. She avoids sentimentality, instead constructing a vision of contemporary life that feels disturbingly plausible. Santos’s performance anchors the film with extraordinary sensitivity, conveying both vulnerability and quiet endurance.

On Falling stands as a compelling portrait of modern precarity — a story of ordinary people navigating systems that quietly erode their sense of self.

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