With just her second feature, Mascha Schilinski achieved what many established directors spend decades chasing: a hallowed place in the Cannes Official Competition. Sound of Falling marked the German film-maker’s first time on the Croisette, and her first win: the film shared the Jury Prize with Oliver Laxe’s equally buzzy Sirat.
Schilinski’s well-deserved victory signals the arrival of a remarkable new talent in European cinema, one capable of reckoning with memory and the lingering presence of the past in a manner that recalls such masters as Andrei Tarkovsky and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Jury Prize had previously been awarded only once to a German production: in 1959 for Konrad Wolf’s Stars. Sound of Falling was subsequently selected as Germany’s Oscar entry for best international feature.
“Cannes was an enormous gift for everyone who worked on the film for four or five years,” says Schilinski. “We had to defend the film for a long time and feared we might not be able to make it. Of course, it’s recognition for the work, but it’s also a gift, because the film is now out in the world. It could easily have been a niche film seen by only a few hundred people. Cannes changed the course of events.
The film’s origins lie in a chance discovery. Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter spent a summer in the Altmark region near the Elbe river, at the heart of the lowlands and floodplains known as the “cradle of Prussia”. Here, they came across an eerie farmstead that seemed suspended in time.
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The large house had stood empty for half a century. Inside, they found a 1920 snapshot of three haunted-looking women staring directly into the camera. Standing where the photographer once stood, Schilinski, hot on the heels of her 2017 Berlin-selected debut, Dark Blue Girl, felt strangely confronted by their gaze across a century. The encounter sparked a simple question: what happened to them?
“The gaze of these three women moved us deeply because we were standing in exactly the same place where they had stood,” says Schilinski. “It was not originally our intention to tell the story exclusively from a woman’s perspective. That emerged through the research. It became clear that women’s stories existed on the margins, and we needed to bring those margins to the centre. Especially since we wanted to show, over the course of a century, how women are looked at, how the gaze falls upon them.”
The mysterious photograph kick-started an ambitious, five-year project. Sound of Falling traces the lives of four girls across a hundred years on a northern German farm. Although fictional, the story is grounded in the textures of lived experience and the social realities of rural women, particularly agricultural workers whose lives were often harsh and undocumented.
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As the narrative unfolds, the girls’ lives – whether lived during the Great War or the early 1980s – begin to mirror one another. During an extensive research process, Schilinski read every document available, from children’s literature to contemporaneous diaries. She made some startling discoveries.
“We found a couple of books written from a child’s perspective, describing an idyllic childhood in that region,” she recalls. “In these books, among the pragmatic, chatty descriptions – the father packing tobacco into his pipe, the mother doing laundry, children playing in the straw – there would suddenly be disturbing, sharp sentences. For example: ‘The maid had to be made harmless for the men.’ That kind of violence was described in the same way that they wrote about day-to-day farmwork.”
One diary entry, penned by a maid named Bertha in 1910, simply read: “My whole life was pointless. I lived for nothing.”
“It was very difficult to find out exactly what had taken place,” says Schilinski. “We couldn’t say what kinds of enforced sterilisation occurred, or whether it was systematic or isolated cases. We don’t know whether they happened in that specific place. We couldn’t get any further in our research. But through discussions with people in the area, we realised there were many repressed secrets. And that things like this had happened to these maids. What we know for certain is that these women did not have independent lives.”
Originally developed under the evocative working title The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue, the film generated early buzz before being streamlined to Sound of Falling, a phrase that captures its elemental, sensory quality. The German title is similarly mysterious: In die Sonne Schauen, roughly translated as: looking into the sun. In this evocative spirit, the writing process was rooted in images and montage rather than conventional arcs. Schilinski and Louise Peter worked associatively.
“Our producers gave us complete freedom and believed in us,” she says. “Some people weren’t prepared to support the project because they wanted a particular kind of historical film; a certain ‘recipe’. I’m especially pleased that many German filmmakers have since told me the film gave them courage to make the kind of film they truly want to make.”
Produced on a modest budget, the two-and-a-half-hour film was shot in just 34 days, with limited rehearsal time and strict regulations around working with minors. The cast is expansive, encompassing multiple generations, with no single protagonist dominating the story. Schilinski and her team conducted an exhaustive year-long casting process, seeing around 1,400 girls. She searched for faces that felt authentic to their respective eras, and the region. The younger cast – numbering dozens – required careful management. The director spoke to their parents about the children’s understanding of death. She invented games, including a pretend shower, that allowed younger, first-time performers to change into their character and back again.
“Working with children requires enormous patience,” says Schilinski. “You have to see many of them, and you must protect them. But also trust them. They know what works. They have very good instincts.”
Central to realising her vision was cinematographer Fabian Gamper, Schilinski’s husband and long-time collaborator. With so little time to experiment on set, their shared visual language proved essential. The camera moves fluidly through different time periods, like a spectral witness.
“It was wonderful working with Fabian,” says the director. “We know each other so well that we can immediately develop ideas together. We talked a lot about how it feels to have a memory you can no longer access. How can we create past histories – memories – for different generations. Fabian operated the camera himself. In a sense, he became a protagonist in the film. The camera moves, like a spirit, across different periods.”
I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I left school and joined a circus as a magician.
— Mascha Schilinski
The daughter of German film-maker Claudia Schilinski and a French construction worker – her father helped with wallpapering and set-building for Sound of Falling – Schilinski took a far from linear path to directing. A self-described teenage troublemaker, she left school early and spent years travelling and searching for a vocation. She eventually began writing short stories and later worked in an agency representing young actors, where she developed a keen awareness of how scripts often over explain. Unable to attend university without formal qualifications, she entered the Hamburg Film Academy through a special programme, initially writing for television soap operas. Aged 28, she formally began to study directing.
“Through my mother, I knew that making films existed,” she recalls. “But I also saw the unemployed actors in our family circle and how difficult that life could be. For a long time, I had no plans to become a director. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I left school and joined a circus as a magician. That taught me to work independently and to live with not knowing what will happen next. Uncertainty doesn’t frighten me. It feels like maximum freedom.”
Cannes was exciting, but screening the film for the Altmark locals – many of whom pitched in during the shoot – was even more rewarding.
“That was the most exciting premiere experience for me,” says Schilinski. “Because people opened their doors, found things for us, and acted as extras. We screened it in a local town, and everyone who had been involved came. Most of them had no experience of watching art house films. I was very nervous and excited. The most moving thing was that people reflected on their own family histories. Some people over 80 began telling us things they had repressed. The kind of things they might not even have revealed on their deathbed. After that screening, we felt we could immediately make the next film.”
Sound of Falling is in cinemas from March 6th
