How to make an empathetic portrait of the precariat

What is the human cost of the immediate availability of consumer goods that digital technology provides us with? Who is behind the packages that flood the homes of the techno-capitalist society in which we live every day? Without raising her voice or adding insult to injury, Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira answers these questions by painting a portrait, with exemplary rigor and empathy, of one of the people who make up this new social class that Guy Standing defined as precariat.

Aurora (Joana Santos, equally austere and moving) is a Portuguese immigrant in Scotland. She lives in a depressing shared apartment and works in a huge warehouse, traversing its aisles every day with the only company of the scanner she uses to identify the heterogeneous objects that other people think they need. Although On falling, awarded at San Sebastián, is produced by Ken Loach and shares with the director's work a humanist tone and an alienating vision of work, Carreira's formal approach is closer to the Dardennes. Like them, the director extracts emotion and political discourse from a rigorous naturalism devoid of any miserabilism. Carreira only needs a couple of everyday events (a broken cell phone, a job interview) to devastatingly show how economic violence relentlessly affects the bodies (weakened by isolation and economic and emotional scarcity) and the minds (on the verge of collapse) of this new, increasingly unhappy world.