Award-Winning Cannes Film “Sound of Falling”   Where Memories Dwell

Mascha Schilinski’s award-winning Cannes entry “Sound of Falling” tells the stories of four girls who live on a farm in Germany’s Altmark region in different timeframes. It is a poetic masterpiece about remembering, physical memory and transgenerational trauma.

Where are our memories stored? In our heads, perhaps. Or in our hearts. Or in our bodies – athletes talk after all about “muscle memory”. If we lose a part of our body, we can still suffer phantom pain, as our bodies, our nerves, remember the missing limb.

Special Award in Cannes

Mascha Schilinski’s drama Sound of Falling is all about what is missing, what we feel and how we remember. The film was awarded the Jury Prize at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the third most prestigious prize after the Palme d’Or and the Grand Prix.

It’s worth taking this honour seriously, for never before in the festival’s long history has a female German director celebrated such a triumph. Her male colleagues Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders had previously been the only Germans to scoop any of the main prizes. Wenders not only received the Palme d’Or for Paris Texas in 1984, but seven years later was also awarded the Grand Prix for Faraway, So Close!.

Nobody had been expecting Schilinski in Cannes. Previously, she had directed only “Dark Blue Girl”, her graduation film at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Yet Sound of Falling touched everyone’s hearts. Or their bodies or heads – wherever it is that memories dwell: the film is a reflection on perception and memory and does not pursue any conventional narrative. The film is populated by fascinating female protagonists: a seven-year-old blond girl with plaits named Alma (Hanna Heckt) who, wearing a white apron and clogs, runs through a creaking farmhouse in Germany’s Altmark region shortly before the First World War; a young woman called Erika (Lea Drinda), who lives on the same farm towards the end of the Second World War; teenage Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), who desperately wants to escape the confines of the farm and of East Germany in the 1980s; and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) from Berlin, whose parents, along with her and her younger sister Nelly, want to give rural life a go in the present day – and pick this same farmhouse as their new home.

The farm is also inhabited by other female characters: mothers, sisters, servants, aunts and friends – and of course men such as Alma’s brother Fritz, who was subjected by his parents to a brutal “accident” ahead of the First World War to ensure he wouldn’t be called up to fight and who in the 1940s becomes the one-legged secret object of Erika’s desire. And Angelika’s cousin Rainer, who finds her attempts at flirting too much to cope with, or her Uncle Uwe, who is likewise not blind to Angelika’s awakening sexuality.

When Places and History Are Etched Into Our Bodies

The threads of connection that the 41-year-old Berlin director and screenplay writer spins between her characters, times and storylines are physical and geographical in nature: they appear to be etched into the bones and floorboards of the house itself, from where they diffuse along secret channels into the heads of her characters. Perhaps women’s destinies are in any case global: it’s not only Alma who is haunted by memories that she hasn’t actually experienced herself; the other young women and girls also have déjà-vu, (unconsciously) repeat gestures, words and actions, and discover faces in images that resemble their own.

The camera, in the capable hands of Fabian Gamper, provides a temporal and visual manifestation of their movements. It floats like a ghost over the events as they unfold, orbiting the protagonists and looking at times directly into their faces, accompanied by the voice of a child narrator who tells the story in genuine Low German dialect, something that is rarely heard these days.

All the same, Sound of Falling is far from unwieldy or abstract; rather it is a sensual and tangible film that brings its stories vividly to life: Fritz has lost his joie de vivre along with his leg; a maid was forcibly sterilised, as was common practice in those days; with the threat of the approaching Red Army, a group of women opt for mass suicide; ideally, Angelika would also like to disappear – specifically from a Polaroid image. And in the present day, Lenka’s family is whispering about how the mother of her new friend Kaya died of cancer.

Sensitive Visual Imagery With Universal Impact

Unlike directors such as Michael Haneke, who uses atmospheric and extremely concrete storylines and scenes to portray the rigidity and confines of rural life in “The White Ribbon”, Schilinski uses transgenerational trauma – which can only be sensed, not grasped – as an invisible protagonist. The sensitive montage of images by Evelyn Rack and Billie Mind, the use of daguerreotypes and Super 8, not to mention the rumbling soundtrack, lend the film a playful depth. The work is by no means playful however, and its underlying tone is neither light nor dark, but above all poetic – and as transitory as a dream.

Sound of Falling is deeply rooted in the Altmark region, both linguistically and thematically, yet its impact is universal. Its triumphal procession through cinemas and festivals, picking up international film awards along the way, not only reflects the success of this powerful, genre-defying film and highlights the demand for unconventional narrative techniques, but is also evidence of the globality of feelings. Just like the memories they accompany, they are fleeting yet elemental. It’s marvellous that this film has managed to capture them.

November 2025