43° TFF - Sound of Falling (In die Sonne Schauen) by Mascha Schillinski (Germany, 2025)
- Planet Claire
- 14 minutes ago
- 5 min read
review by Clara Bruno, 28 November 2025
film seen at the 43rd TFF on 27 November 2025 reading time: 5 min
unning time: 149’
official Out of Competition screening of the 43rd TFF
the film was presented at the 78th Cannes Film Festival and the 43rd Torino Film Festival
original German title: In Die Sonne Schauen (“Staring at the Sun”)
screenplay: Louise Peter
director: Mascha Schillinski
This is the second feature film by the Berlin-based director.
It won the Jury Prize at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
This is a wholly female-driven film: written by Louise Peter, directed by Mascha Schillinski, performed by actresses of different ages and viewed entirely from the perspectives of the female characters.
Mascha Schillinski, from Berlin, the daughter of two filmmakers, here signs her second feature. It is a dense and unsettling tale, filmed in a highly personal manner, set entirely within a rural house, a farm in the Altmark region (Saxony-Anhalt) in north-eastern Germany, the former GDR.
The work unfolds along four different timelines, between the early 1900s and contemporary Germany. Yet the film does not follow a conventional narrative; the storytelling is non-linear, with the eras overlapping and blending like fragments of a single mosaic.
The screenwriter and director spent three and a half years constructing the story, including two years rearranging all the accumulated material into a new order: an extremely ambitious project for a filmmaker fresh out of film school.
Louise Peter explains:“We lived this experience on a century-old farm; we were fascinated by the thought of who had lived there before, who had sat in exactly the same spot where we were sitting at that moment. We also found an old photograph of two women standing in front of the farmhouse with some chickens around them: they looked straight at us, as if saying ‘Hello, tell our story, tell our story.’ We also read many books about the countryside where we were shooting, and spoke with many local people, it was very interesting.”
The film shows how among the protagonists of the different eras and generations there exists an almost “ghostly” co-presence, or a kind of genetic memory: certainly an emotional continuity linking their suffering and despair.
Almost a prose epic poem, it is a drama about intergenerational trauma inscribed within the soul of each character and mysteriously passed down to descendants - to children and grandchildren.
For Germans born after the 1950s, in the aftermath of the fall of the Third Reich, and with a growing awareness up to the present day, reflecting on how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next is crucial. The idea for the film springs from this reflection.
The story is filled with violent, repressed experiences; it is thick with fear and sadness held inside. The work shows -or rather hints at- the horror lurking in the behaviour of abusive adults.There is resentment, secrecy, sacrifice, guilt, arduous labour, horror, unspeakable violence against the weak, rape (never shown, yet unmistakably present), and the domestic servitude imposed on women.
During and just after the First World War, a young man named Fritz (Filip Schnack) has a leg amputated due to what the family calls a “work accident in the fields”, though in reality it is the result of terrifying punitive violence inflicted by the adults. The boy must be washed and is intimately cared for by the maid Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), who herself carries the weight of unspeakable cruelty suffered on the farm. The girls who came into service were forcibly sterilised by the removal of the uterus, so that the masters could abuse them at will without fear of pregnancy. One girl sent to a farm as a servant, rather than face her “destiny”, throws herself from the cart taking her there and kills herself. This event, too, is conveniently reclassified as a “work accident”.
The focus of this initial chapter is Alma (Hanna Heckt), a child who observes the family’s strange “traditions” without understanding them -or rather silently judging them for the horror they contain. She also looks at the macabre “death photographs” of deceased relatives, blurred and worn by time, which resemble pictures of ghosts. Alma is troubled by a photograph of a dead child who looks strikingly like her.
Years later, again in the same rural house, the female observer/narrator is the young Erika (Lea Drinda), who develops a morbid, almost erotic fascination with the old “Uncle Fritz” (Martin Rother) and fantasises about herself with an amputated leg.
Further ahead, around the 1970s in the former East Germany, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) is a teenage farm worker, abused by the repulsive Uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and aware that Uwe’s young son, her cousin Rainer (Florian Geisselmann), is in love with her and harbours resentment after being rejected. When Angelika joins the family for a group photo taken with the new instant Polaroid technology, she experiences a disturbing sensation similar to Alma’s: a sense of death. And then she vanishes, even from the photograph, or -more rationally- escapes from that dehumanising microcosm.
Later still, in modern, reunified Germany, the young Lenka (Läni Geiseler) befriends by chance a strange, intense girl named Kaya (Ninel Geiger), whose mother has died.
Gradually, the connections among the characters come to light, yet remain ambiguous and blurred. The film also hints at other characters and other foreboding events.
What binds the events and characters, besides the farmhouse, is the river where they swim, part of the border with the West and home to slippery, repulsive eels.
From all this material, the viewer grasps only fragments. The film, intentionally very fragmented, remarkably sustains the tone desired by the director from beginning to end. The experiences are not directly explored but alluded to.
It is an important film, endowed with an enigmatic allure and superbly crafted. Every shot carries unease; the camera lifts and withdraws from scenes like a ghost.
The Sound of Falling may be the weight of history pressing upon the protagonists, or perhaps the call of the void, the impulse to let oneself fall in order to escape pain, the burden of not being noticed, of failing to be seen, heard, understood; the impossibility of translating one’s emotions into concrete, liberating actions.
The Ambient soundtrack pulses through the film, accompanying the underlying malaise and the unease of events.
The Sound of Falling is a beautiful and ambitious film, a kind of "folk horror", yet we know that all these events, in various forms, were part of historical reality.
The film will represent Germany at the 2026 Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category.
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