Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen)

How many stories can a house contain before its seams begin to crack? In Sound of Falling, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka share a farmhouse in northern Germany across a century. As residents come and go, the place itself changes too: the subdued, somber atmosphere of the wartime years gives way to a touch of playfulness in the 1980s, eventually leading to a contemporary bohemian minimalism. Yet through all these transformations, the unspoken grief and disappointments of the four young women linger in the air like something condensed and heavy. That weight is carried and embodied by successive generations.

German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski interlaces the four periods associatively, letting the sensory quality of memory determine the narrative logic. These inherited memories and blurred traumas do not always make themselves known to the characters who carry them: they surface as a gut feeling, an intuition, a shared glance. Schilinski strikingly contrasts the elusiveness of this fractured collective memory with the stark physical presence of death.

The film’s enigmatic quality is amplified by the ominous, buzzing sounds that seep into its haunting soundtrack and the ghostlike drifting of a camera that serves as witness. Internationally acclaimed, Sound of Falling is not only about looking, but also about being (unwillingly) looked at—and rendered invisible. In this light, the film’s origin is remarkable: Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter began writing after discovering a 1920 photograph of three women from different generations staring directly into the lens, something unusual for the time. Schilinski and cinematographer Fabian Gamper also drew inspiration from the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman, known for her hazy, dreamlike (self-)portraits of ethereal quality. This aspect also recalls Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) and The Beguiled (2017), though Schilinski’s approach is more sensorially driven, offering a portrait of isolated young women. Sound of Falling was the great revelation of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning the Jury Prize and later chosen as Germany’s official Oscar submission.