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“‘History’ with a Capital ‘H'”: Mascha Schilinski on Cannes 2025 Award-Winner Sound of Falling
Lena Urzendowsky in Sound of Falling Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling was so rapturously acclaimed upon its premiere on the first full day of Cannes 2025 that some thought they’d already seen a possible Palme d’Or winner. In the end, her film shared the Jury Prize with another adored Competition title, Sirât, whose end-times death-trip might seem to overshadow the ordinary-sounding logline for Sound of Falling: four generations of girls on a farm in Germany. But this film swiftly establishes itself as an equally virtuosic secret history and sustained experiment in female subjectivity in kaleidoscopic form, drawing on scenes and notes from journals and voices from the archives.
Though set during World War I, World War II, Soviet-era East Germany and post-reunification, the characters’ lives are grounded in their families and the life and environs of the farm (no longer operational in the film’s post-2000s thread). Schilinski’s filmmaking gives these stories the warp and weft of experience through technique grounded in sense memory and a temporal sense of being inside each moment, each of which remains porous with the past and future. Each girl in the first three generations, by temperament, tends to seek ways of existing outside of the rules and customs of her era—a struggle commented upon in lapidary voiceover—while the fourth girl, seemingly the least bound by class strictures, is beset by social angst.
Skeptics have lingered on the miseries of these girls, but Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter also bring out the streaks of independence, curiosity and love in their paths, whether fearless 1910s’ Alma and her bond with a grandmother or 1980s’ Angelika gliding through the grounds as if she’s secretly in a musical. But Sound of Falling (in addition to dwelling on death rites) does very much circle sexual traumas, from the casually institutionalized assaults of the farm to apparent incest in the 1980s; part of its intricate structure could be viewed as depth charges of intense experience, horrible or beautiful, competing with one another for primacy in the shaping of identity.
Schilinski has described the camera in Sound of Falling as a kind of protagonist that the children may be somewhat aware of, as if sensing a witness that might register who they are beyond their designated roles; she and DP Fabian Gamper play up an intimacy that more than one critic has compared to evoking a ghost in the room. The film’s orchestration of memories and textures involves a daunting fugue-like structure (editor: Evelyn Rack) that can overwhelm on a first viewing but acquires something of the flow of a song epic on repeat viewings. Indeed, Anna von Hausswolff’s Lynchian ballad-from-the-beyond “Stranger” (previously featured in the finale of Killing Eve) recurs throughout.
Sound of Falling opens with a disorienting sight: a young woman on crutches is later to have tied one leg up to simulate an amputation. In essence, this is an embodied form of curiosity and empathy, of exactly the sort that she and the other girls will repeatedly be denied. But that empathy is what Schilinski aims for, earning comparisons to Campion or Denis (while offering an alternative to the sagas of Heimat and The White Ribbon). At Cannes, I sat down with Schilinski soon after the film’s premiere and discussed the ambitions and technical achievements of Sound of Falling through the inevitable bottleneck of translation.
Filmmaker: Sound of Falling tells histories that aren’t usually told, in ways they aren’t told as well. Did you see the film as an alternative or corrective to the sort of traditional family drama on a farm?
Schilinski: Do you mean “history” with a capital H, or…?
Filmmaker: I guess it could be either.
Schilinski: Yes, I was especially interested in showing everything through the perspective, the subjectivity, of these girls, because the film is very much about combining perception, memory and imagination, and showing how fluid it all is. It was definitely not our intention to follow the traditional psychology of historical films where you have a person growing up on a farm and show the person 80 years later with a wig or something like that.
Filmmaker: Why did you pick these particular time periods?
Schilinski: The starting point was more or less when the house was built, and then we always jumped a generation. So that left us with 1910, 1940, 1980, and then a time period that’s now, or the near future. But we never named these years specifically, because it was very important for us to also show that memory is kind of vague.
Filmmaker: A lot of movies try to move among different eras or memories, but it can be easy to lose the emotional pull along the way. So, the editing and structure of your film is crucial to its success. What was your thinking in terms of editorial structure, and did you try different versions before finding the right one?
Schilinski: I think the first editing started during the scriptwriting process, because it was clear that this would be a kind of mosaic structure, and that this needed to be considered from the start. But it was clear early that this had to be re-done in the editing process. We had to consider how these different people could look at each other from their different time periods, because there were all these echoes and we could see how these could be reflected. Evelyn Rack did the editing, and we sat together and did tons of different versions. It was a big pleasure to do so, because it allowed us to find ever more new combinations of material, and the different characters who were involved could then connect in different ways.
Filmmaker: The sound design helps with orienting the viewer. It sounds like an analog-style rustle is used for transitions between time periods, right?
Schilinski: [In English] You mean the scratchy things? [In German] Yes, that was completely intentional. We started working with the sound already during the scriptwriting process, integrating specific annotations. I was very much interested in this sound/image combination, because it has such a specific impact.
Filmmaker: When you were filming, you obviously had to dress the house and grounds differently for each time period. I assume that means you shot the time periods in sequence?
Schilinski: Yes. It was a big challenge. On top of that, it was a debut film, so that was also reflected in the budget that we had. As you said, we had to change the design depending on the period. Also, we shot with a lot of children, which was also a challenge. And, though it’s not obvious from what you see, we shot the film in summer 2023, which happened to be a summer when it rained a lot and we had to accommodate that, which wasn’t easy.
Filmmaker: What cameras did you use?
Schilinski: We shot on an ALEXA [Mini], and mainly used lots of different lenses, including old ones, and also a pinhole camera.
Filmmaker: That might explain the quality of the light in certain scenes. It’s especially luminous in the 1910s, while in the 1980s the light hits people’s faces in this remarkable way during the night scenes that feels very present-tense.
Schilinski: I think [the light] was somehow in this house from the start. We shot this film in the original place where the script was also written, so we always considered how the light came into the place. Also, we’re talking about childhood memories and some sort of idyllic place, but the idyllic place keeps being interrupted, so we used the light to show that kind of thing.
Filmmaker: Violence keeps erupting in one way or another into their lives, but you don’t really show the physical violence explicitly on screen. You show people’s reactions to these events.
Schilinski: Yes, we try to always show the perspective through the eyes of these girls; if they hadn’t been in a situation, you don’t see it either. We also try to show how they remember it from a later point of time, and things they don’t actually remember or that they try not to remember. There’s a certain brutality that arises from the absolute pragmatism [on the farm], and the fact that a situation like what happens to Trudi, for example, is described in the same way as when one puts out the laundry.
Filmmaker: Where did that particular horrifying detail come from? [We’re told that Trudi and other servants on the farm are taken away to be sterilized.]
Schilinski: We found a book about childhood memories in the region of Altmark. It talked a lot about this being some kind of idyllic place, the lost paradise of childhood. There was quite a conversational tone to how it was discussed. But integrated at different odd places were little sentences that felt quite violent, the way they were expressed alongside all these other things. One sentence, for instance, was that servants needed to be made to be not dangerous to men.
Filmmaker: You’ve said before that people in a village near where you filmed were helpful to the production. Were you able to show the movie to them?
Schilinski: Not yet, but we hope to be able to do so soon. There’s a specific WhatsApp group. People are looking forward to it.
Filmmaker: These are stories that women have experienced everywhere in history, but what would you say is particular to Germany?
Schilinski: The film could have been set everywhere, but it would have looked different. This has to do with the fact that obviously German history is traumatized.
Filmmaker: Are you more inspired by films or by literature? I found myself thinking of William Faulkner a bit more than any particular filmmaker.
Schilinski: It was not so much films that inspired me. It was literature, authors like Christa Wolf and the American photographer Francesca Woodman. But more so, it was my attempt with my co-author Louise Peter to show the little things, things that you have trouble putting in words, the hidden traumas that women live through.
Filmmaker: With a cast of so many children, how did you immerse them in these eras?
Schilinski: We didn’t have much time to rehearse due to financial and time constraints. We only had 34 days. So, the script was extremely vividly written. Every scene was so precise. In essence, that was the entire process. We spent a long time casting and made sure that we found people who could really feel the material and what had happened. Hanna Heckt, who played Alma, was especially intuitive.
Filmmaker: She is incredible. I feel like someone’s going to put her in a horror genre movie.
Schilinski: Yeah! She’s eight now, but she was seven in the movie.
Filmmaker: That reminds me of another thing I kept noticing: games become a motif in the movie. Memories are often organized around games they played, and of course games are where we learn rules apart from the rules of society. Was that something you were thinking about?
Schilinski: Interesting point. No, the games weren’t a consciously chosen recurring subject, but probably unconsciously it popped up. What’s interesting is that all of the characters live in certain periods of time that each have the specific constraints of these times. All of these women at some point try to break out of these constraints, even if it’s only through imagination and by imagining death.
