A farm in the Altmark region has been home to young women for centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century Alma and her sisters lived there, followed by young Erika in the 1940s, teenager Angelika in the GDR of the 1980s, and finally Nelly and Lenka in the here and now, whose parents wanted to move their family from Berlin to the countryside. What connects the women across the generations is not just the location or a twig in the family tree. Their lives are linked by an invisible bond, a recurring experience. A hint of past events that moves through the farmstead like a shimmer. Shocks, death, loss, but also love, the lightness of childlike fun, and the tender bond of sisterhood reoccur on this piece of land.

Director Mascha Schilinski wrote the screenplay together with Louise Peter on the farm that would become the setting of the film. Inspired by an old photograph of three women feeding directly looking at the camera while feeding chickens, the two of them asked themselves how these women lived, and what lied hidden in the gaps that opened up in the temporal gap and the synchrony of the place. This mysterious directness – five looks that converge over decades – becomes the organizing principle of the film.

SOUND OF FALLING evades a classic, chronological narrative, weaving time and space, everyday rituals, and phenomena of perception into a tightly woven blanket that drapes itself over the audience, allowing even the most ghostly apparitions to appear consistent. What could have been a conventional multi-generational saga becomes a lyrical exploration of inherited trauma. The mystical atmosphere is reminiscent of the stories of Isabel Allende and the magical realism of Latin American cinema.

Alma, named after her sister who died young and who looks almost identical to her, is fascinated by death and the rituals surrounding it, and becomes more and more ghostly. In her world, the maids are made "safe" for men. What this means is revealed in small moments rather than in large, dramatic scenes—the men's hands on the maid's breasts, the eerie staring of men's eyes at pubescent girls' bodies, which continues through the centuries, all the way to Angelika and her uncle, whose gaze she cannot escape during swimming practice in the river. Alongside the farm, this river becomes a recurring border site, not only geopolitically but also metaphysically, as a transition from East to West, from one state to another, or as a possibility of escaping an unwanted fate.

All of this may sound somewhat dark. Mascha Schilinski breaks up the melancholic prevailing tone with moments of lightness – small pranks, the humor of childish directness and the Altmark dialect, the beauty of playing in the sun in old ruins. The images takes on an old master’s coating, in the lighting, the color atmosphere, the composition, yet is also abruptly drastic in its depiction of physicality. On the audio level, there's a humming and buzzing, a deep, heavy breathing. Summer, the predominant season, is palpable. You only hear a piece of music at the end: the ethereal "Stranger" by Anna von Hausswolff.

Like the inspirational photograph, the protagonists keep looking directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and taking viewers into this floating space. They confide secrets to them and make them part of the story. This makes SOUND OF FALLING an impressively rigorous film and a haunting, poetic viewing experience that the Cannes jury couldn’t resist.

Clarissa Lempp (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy