Carol Morley discusses The Falling at Glasgow Film Festival 2015

Video | 04 Mar 2015

At its Scottish premiere, writer-director Carol Morley discusses her new film The Falling, the follow-up to her celebrated documentary Dreams of a Life, at Glasgow Film Festival.

During the Q&A with GFF co-director Allan Hunter, Morley discusses her inspiration for the film, which centres on a girls' school in the late 60s where a hysterical fainting epidemic has broken out. "It began because I was on the phone to a friend and she started talking about this village she's heard of in Medieval times that couldn't stop laughing. I looked it up and found another village in 60s Tanzania where some girls at a school couldn't stop laughing and they started to get really ill and faint and it spread through Tanzania. That's when I realised there was a title for [the condition]. It's commonly know as mass hysteria, but actually the correct title is mass psychogenic illness... What fascinated me is that 60% of them happen in schools and 90% of reported cases are female... I became obsessed at that point about one day making a feature film in a school exploring an outbreak and the reasons behind it."

Morley also tells the Glasgow audience why she chose to set the film in the 60s and reveals some of the research she did to create the film's vivid characters.

Video produced by Cutscene Media Ltd. and Glasgow Film Festival.


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