Ones to watch in 2024: Laura Carreira

With the backing of Ken Loach’s production company, Edinburgh-based Laura Carreira has shot her first feature film, about a Portuguese immigrant working in a distribution centre in Scotland. Interview by Alistair Harkness

It’s mid-December and filmmaker Laura Carreira, on a Zoom call from her flat in Edinburgh, is telling me about the moment she fell in love with cinema. “I got introduced to John Cassavetes’ work by complete accident,” she says. “It was showing one afternoon and I just bought the next ticket. It sounded kind of interesting, but I had no clue what I was going to watch. And it was just so different to anything I had seen up until that point. The idea that a film could be that was very new to me.”

As a result, she developed a “slight obsession” with the godfather of independent cinema (known for his raw DIY aesthetic), particularly his 1971 relationship drama Minnie and Moskovitz. To prove it, she pans her laptop screen to the right to show me a framed poster for the film hanging on her wall. “It’s probably the first film I fell completely in love with.”

A high school student at the time, it’s a love that has come full circle. Now 29, Carreira – who’s from Portugal but has been based in Edinburgh since she came to study film at the College of Art when she was 18 – has just finished principal photography on her debut feature. A drama about a Portuguese immigrant working in a distribution centre in Scotland, the tentatively titled On Falling is backed by Sixteen Films, the production company owned by Ken Loach and his long-time producing partner Rebecca O’Brien. A big deal in other words. And though she’ll only just be starting the editing process as 2024 gets going, if her award-winning short films Red Hill (2018) and The Shift (2020) are anything to go by, it’s already shaping up to be one of the most anticipated debuts of recent years.

Those shorts, after all, demonstrated an incredibly assured cinematic talent at work. Shot through with a lyrical beauty and humanism that brings to mind the likes of the Dardenne brothers, Lynne Ramsay, Kelly Reichardt and Chloé Zhao, Carreira’s work also has a distinctive feel for character-based storytelling that’s all her own. Maybe it’s that early exposure to Cassavetes in high school, but she’s developed a remarkable facility with actors too, able to tease out spontaneous, naturalistic performances whether she’s working with trained professionals or friends of friends doing her a favour.

Watch the self-financed Red Hill, for instance – which she developed after meeting an ageing security guard at one of the shale bings just outside Edinburgh – and you’ll see a beautifully wrought performance from Billy Mack as an ex-miner confronting the existential fear of imminent retirement. The Shift, meanwhile, which premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, compresses a complex exploration of the indignities and consequences of the gig economy into a nuanced, heartbreaking portrait of a Scottish agency worker (Anna Russell-Martin) forced to weigh up the cost of living as she walks round a supermarket awaiting a phone call to find out if she’ll work that day. They’re Scottish films with a global outlook, though Carreira thinks of them more as localised films about how we all live now. “We’re in a globalised economy, so everyone has to live the same way and that’s part of the problem.”

It’s a theme inspired by her time at Edinburgh College of Art. Having to work to support herself, she did a variety of low-paying jobs – including waitressing in Jenners café – and found it tricky to balance lectures with the number of shifts she had to do to earn a bare minimum. Her fellow students were in the same boat, so it was also difficult to work collaboratively on each other’s projects. “That was a shock,” she says. “All of of a sudden life just seemed to revolve completely around work.”

It was a stark contrast to the sky’s-the-limit freedom she’d experienced as an artistic teen in Portugal. Growing up in a small town near Porto, she moved to Lisbon when she was 15 to attend an arts-based high school that was essentially film school for teens. “In Portugal you can basically do your entire high school in an arts degree already,” she explains.

Filmmaker Laura Carreira PIC: Lisa Ferguson / The Scotsman

Portugal’s national film museum, Cinemateca Portuguesa, was also on her doorstep, which is where she stumbled across Cassavetes’ work, and she started learning how to make her own films at school too. Then a teacher recommended the film degree at Edinburgh College of Art, which is how she ended up in Scotland in 2012. “Obviously Brexit hadn't happened yet,” she sighs.

The fact she’d rarely seen the reality of working life reflected in movies, though, became the thing she most wanted to address in her own work. Hence Red Hill and The Shift. Both started opening doors for her as a writer/director, bringing her to the attention of Sixteen Films and her current producer Jack Thomas-O’Brien.

Given Ken Loach’s legacy, the implicit endorsement Sixteen Films’ involvement brings with it must have meant a lot to her going into her first feature. “Oh yeah, it couldn’t have been better,” she says. “I remember even the first time I got a letter from them that said they were part of the project – I was like, ‘I’m going to frame that!’”

Shooting the new film between Edinburgh and Glasgow in the last quarter of 2023, she modestly views her debut, which builds on these themes, as part of a decade-long work-in-progress. But what she’s achieved is impressive. So many promising filmmakers get stuck in funding holding patterns, never making anything. Carreira, though, already has her next film in development and seems to be taking this one in her stride.

I ask what her first day on set was like. “Obviously, it was the biggest crew I've ever worked with and that in itself was pretty scary. But actually it was beautiful,” she says. “It was just like, ‘Oh, there’re all these people and they're experts in their fields.’ For years this idea was just with me, so all of a sudden, the idea of working with so many people became a positive thing.

“When you don't have to make it all by yourself, there’s so much to gain.”

For more information visit: www.lauracarreira.com and www.sixteenfilms.co.uk