Mascha Schilinski, despite having helmed “The Daughter” while in grad school, is making a statement: Her true feature film debut is upcoming Cannes release “Sound of Falling,” which already has critics deeming Schilinski as the next voice of atmospheric female angst.
“Sound of Falling” will premiere in competition at Cannes, with mk2 handling sales. The film centers on four generations of girls — Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka — who each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany. The evolution across a century of which each family member considers to be home during their respective teen years is threaded by uncanny parallelisms that lead to the question: Can memories can be inherited, repeated, and ultimately, relived?
Schilinski cowrote the film with Louise Peter after spending a summer on a once-abandoned farm in the Altmark region between Berlin and Hamburg, where the film was later set. The duo found an old photograph on the property, showing three women looking directly into the camera. As Schilinski said in a press note for “Sound of Falling,” the image inspired the premise of the film. “[It was as though] these women were breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at us from the past. That basically gave us the atmosphere that runs through the whole movie,” Schilinski said. “We were interested in the simultaneity of time levels, that in the same place one person does something very mundane and the other perhaps has an existential, life-changing experience.”
Schilinski added that the film is “about the act of remembering itself, about how perception and memory work” especially through subjective points of view and the bodily remnants of inherited dissassociative trauma. “For me, there is always the uncertainty that you can never be sure whether something really happened like this and where dreams and reality intertwine,” she said.
Fabian Gamper is to thank for the hazy lush cinematography style. The film was shot over 34 days on location.
“In many ways, I look at ‘Sound of Falling’ as my debut film. While I had some experience through my previous project ‘The Daughter,’ that film was the final project in my third year at the film academy, and it wasn’t supposed to be a feature,” Schilinski said. “The limitations we had to work with [on ‘Sound of Falling’] forced us all to use the greatest possible precision and concentration. I had to completely follow my intuition.”
“Sound of Falling” premieres as a sales title from mk2 at Cannes. Check out a clip of the feature below.
