Sound of Falling is only Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, and it arrived with real force. Premiered in competition at Cannes on 14 May 2025, it took the Jury Prize, became the first film by a German woman to compete for the Palme d’Or since Toni Erdmann in 2016, and went on to win ten Lolas at the German Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Germany submitted it for the Best International Feature Oscar, where it made the December shortlist. The Cannes competition that year ended with the Palme going elsewhere. In Britain and Ireland it is a MUBI release, and it screened at the BFI London Film Festival.
Four girls, one farm, a century
The German title, In die Sonne schauen (Looking into the Sun), says more about the film. Four girls, Alma, Erika, Angelika and Lenka, each spend their youth on the same farmstead in the Altmark, the flat rural country between Berlin and Hamburg. Alma is seven in the 1910s, Erika a teenager in the 1940s, Angelika grows up in the GDR of the 1980s, and twelve-year-old Lenka lives there now, long after the Wall fell. The narrative moves between the periods without signposts: gestures, games, phrases and rooms recur until time seems to dissolve and the house itself becomes the protagonist.
Hanna Heckt plays Alma, Lea Drinda is Erika, Lena Urzendowsky is Angelika and Laeni Geiseler is Lenka. None of them carries the film alone, and that is deliberate. Schilinski is interested in what passes between generations of women without being said aloud: what a room remembers, and the ache of things that happened before you were born.
Where the film came from
The film began with a house. Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter spent a summer on a farm in the Altmark that had stood empty for fifty years, planning to work on separate projects. Instead they started wondering who had lived there before them. In one room they found a photograph from around 1920: three maids standing in the farmyard, looking straight into the lens, and, as it felt to the two women, straight at them across a century. That gaze became the film’s atmosphere: the idea that in one place, one person can be doing something entirely mundane while another, in the same room decades apart, lives through something existential.
Why it looks the way it does
See it on the biggest screen you can, because of Fabian Gamper’s cinematography. He films the low northern light of the Altmark patiently, so that the interiors feel like an archive and the fields feel uneasy, as if something happened there that nobody mentions. Schilinski has said she wanted the characters to gaze back after a century of being gazed at, and Gamper’s camera grants them that: long, level looks that explain nothing.
The film invites comparison with Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Fellini’s Amarcord, and the comparison holds because of how the film is built, not because of how it looks. Mirror folds one man’s life into history; Sound of Falling does the opposite and folds history into the lives of girls. The wars stay in the background, while a mouth tied shut on a grandmother’s corpse, a borrowed dress, a Polaroid with a blurred figure carry the full weight.
A director to follow
Sound of Falling was made by a filmmaker who had previously directed Dark Blue Girl while still studying at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg, then worked briefly as a casting director. You can see that experience in how closely she watches faces and what they give away. Her next project has not been announced. At 155 minutes the film is long, and it is worth the time: by the end you understand that you have been watching four versions of the same girlhood.
