Mascha Schilinski’s Cannes Jury Prize–winner braids past and present, telling the history of a tumultuous century through the lives of four girls who spend their respective youths on the same farm in northern Germany.
Alongside the river Elbe between Berlin and Hamburg, a family farm sits in a particularly tumultuous region, one that saw both world wars and defined East and West Germany. Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling braids together the lives of four generations of inhabitants of this place: Alma (Hanna Heckt) in the early 20th century, Erika (Lea Drinda) in the 1940s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the present. As time moves both forwards and backwards throughout the encampment, where walls can all but talk, each character faces her unwitting, often unfortunate, fate and the home itself becomes a mirror to the nation’s brutal and tormented history.
As ferocity and violence, usually at the hands of men, hides around every corner regardless of the decade, Schilinski’s characters struggle to define themselves in societies that see them as expendable servants, spoils of war, or sexual playthings. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Schilinski’s sophomore film is rich with craft and haunting detail. Co-written with Louise Peter and shot by Fabian Gamper whose camera moves like a ghost through the farm’s nooks and crannies, Sound of Falling is a sombre, poetic, and skilled chronicle that reverberates beyond its volatile confines.
DOROTA LECH
Content advisory: mature themes
Screenings
Scotiabank 10
TIFF Lightbox 2
Scotiabank 11
Scotiabank 9