SOUND OF FALLING (IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN) Discovery

Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, German director Mascha Schilinski’s (DARK BLUE GIRL) stunning sophomore feature is a hypnotic, time-traversing portrait of four generations of women living in the same isolated German farmhouse over the course of a century. Starting in the early 1900s, spanning the Second World War, the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s and present-day Germany, Schilinski’s puzzle box narrative follows Alma (Hanna Heckt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) as they endure private and political traumas that echo eerily across time. Unfolding like a labyrinthine ghost story, Schilinski’s film gradually reveals itself as an unexpected epic about the ways in which women’s lives are shaped by seen and unseen socio-political forces, and in which inherited trauma forges a kinship across generations. With a restrained visual language that leans on Fabian Gamper’s 4:3 cinematography to create an immersive, painterly world, in which the camera glides through interior domestic spaces like the disembodied ghost of an earlier era, and an unsettling score by Anna von Hausswolff that amplifies the unearthly atmosphere of dread and longing — the film reflects place as a palimpsest for family history, connecting cultural memory with shared emotion. SOUND OF FALLING is a cinematic, poetic meditation on the ghosts we carry and those we leave behind. –Abbie Algar