German director Mascha Schilinski brings buzzy “Sound of Falling” to Cannes competition, alongside the ghosts that haunted her when she was writing the feature with Louise Peter on a farm.
“There are spirits and ghosts in us, and ghosts that live on this old farm,” she says.
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“When you enter a room, you don’t know what happened there, but you still feel it. That’s how it was when we were writing. This place had been abandoned for 50 years, but everything was still there, including a spoon a farmer put down for the last time.”
It made her think about “the simultaneity of time,” she says. In the film, boarded by MK2, four girls from different time periods over the course of 100 years live out their youth on the farm in Germany’s Altmark region. Eras — and tragedies — blend into each other seamlessly.
“That was very important to me: we are immediately thrown into their experience. We look at everything through the protagonists’ eyes. This film is, above all, about remembering. About how we remember and how we perceive. At first, you’re trapped in the moment and in your body, but over time, when you look back, you’re able to look at yourself from the outside.”
Born in Berlin, Schilinski made her feature debut with “Dark Blue Girl” in 2017. But in many ways, the ambitious “Sound of Falling” — produced by Lucas Schmidt, Lasse Scharpen and Maren Schmitt while Studio Zentral and ZDF are also historical the drama — feels like her first film, she says.
“It was my first after leaving the Film Academy [Baden-Württemberg] and we had a budget that was appropriate for that, but not necessarily for the much bigger project it turned into.”
Still, instead of focusing on politics or “the great traumas of war,” she shows little moments that her characters — children witnessing death, forcefully sterilized dairy maids or a girl torn between East and West Germany — can’t even put into words. But those moments change them forever.
“They burn under their skin. In my film, what we don’t see is just as important. When we talk about memory, what can we actually access? Which parts of our past? Because of the way memory works, sometimes it’s not the biggest traumas or biggest events that condition us the most,” she states.
“We asked ourselves: ‘Is there something like body memories, memories of things that might have happened before we were even born?’ Things we cannot know and yet they shape us, things we cannot access because we lack words to describe them. And can certain experiences be passed on intergenerationally?” she asks
In “Sound of Falling,” the answer seems to be yes, with her characters connected to each other as if by an invisible string, unable to break the cycle.
“They can’t escape, except through death. And that’s something many of them are thinking about, even though they also have this strong desire to live,” she notes.
“It’s something we come to the world with: We want to survive. I was curious to see what needs to happen for this will to finally break,” she says. “As a filmmaker, I need to connect with my characters and really look through their eyes. I do feel for them and want to find out things about them, and that only works if I identify with them up to a certain extent. I might not always find an excuse for their dubious actions or terrible decisions, but I find explanations.”
Readying for the Cannes premiere, Schilinski is already thinking about other stories to tell. But most of all, she wants to play.
“Cinema is a relatively young artform and I want to feel like I’m still exploring its possibilities. It’s very gratifying to be able to do that. This is what I’m hoping for: No limitations.”
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