Sound of Falling (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Mascha Schilinski
Producer: Maren Schmitt,Lasse Scharpen,Lucas Schmidt
Screenwriter: Louise Peter,Mascha Schilinski
Cinematographer: Fabian Gamper
Composer: Michael Fiedler,Eike Hosenfeld
Editor: Billie Mind,Evelyn Rack
Production Designer: Cosima Vellenzer
Costume Designer: Sabrina Krämer
Key Cast: Luise Heyer,Hanna Heckt,Lena Urzendowsky,Susanne Wuest

Viewer Advice: Contains suicide and sexual violence themes, and themes of child sexual abuse.

Four intergenerational stories anchored by one German farmhouse evoke impressions of girlhood across the 20th century in this Cannes Jury Prize winner.

At different points throughout the last century, Alma, Erika, Angelika and Lenka each spend a part of their childhood on the same farm in northern Germany. The farmhouse bears witness to events both global and personal, with two world wars and a divided Germany providing historical backdrops to the girls’ more intimate experiences of growing up – innocent friendships, playful pranks, deep trauma and the burgeoning comprehension of life’s limitations for women under patriarchy.

A joint winner of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, Sound of Falling is a novelistic epic, unfolding in nonlinear fashion and preferencing sense memory over specific, plot-driven events. The four protagonists are connected visually with mirrored gestures, objects and storylines, while Fabian Gamper’s ethereal cinematography hovers through space with ghostlike movements and voyeuristic angles. Earning comparisons to the work of auteurs such as Sofia Coppola, Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick and Jane Campion, writer/director Mascha Schilinski’s second feature is as elegant as it is assured.

“Cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance; forget Cannes, forget the Competition, forget the whole year, even – Sound of Falling is an all-timer.” – Deadline