Few debuts – if a second feature can be called a debut – have landed with the force of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. 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, and the Jury Prize looked, even then, like the prize with the longer life. 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 – is the better guide to 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, which is the point. Schilinski is interested in what passes between generations of women without ever being spoken – the stored knowledge of rooms, the phantom pain of things that happened before you were born.
Where the film came from
The origin story is almost a short film in itself. 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 – or so it felt, straight at the two women, 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
If the film must be seen on the biggest screen available, the reason is Fabian Gamper’s cinematography. The Altmark light – low, northern, indifferent – is photographed with a patience that makes every interior feel like an archive and every field feel like a crime scene with the crime removed. 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 refuse to explain themselves.
The big references suggest themselves – the memory-labyrinths of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, the communal time of Fellini’s Amarcord – and the film survives the comparison because it earns it structurally rather than decoratively. Where Mirror dissolves a man’s life into history, Sound of Falling dissolves history into girls’ lives: the wars arrive as background noise, 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. That detour shows: the film’s attention to faces – what they hide, what they betray – feels professional in the oldest sense. Schilinski’s next move is unknown, but the evidence of this one is plain. At 155 minutes the film asks for stamina and repays it with interest. Watch it for the images alone; stay for the realisation that you have been watching four versions of the same girlhood, and that one of them might be yours.
