Latest news with #Schilinski
DW
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- DW
German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski wins Jury Prize at Cannes – DW – 05/26/2025
Nine years after Maren Ade's "Toni Erdmann," a German filmmaker is in the Cannes competition. Mascha Schilinski has won the Jury Prize with "Sound of Falling." "I was afraid I'd misheard," said the 41-year-old director and screenwriter Mascha Schilinski when her film was named Jury Prize winner at the Cannes International Film Festival. "It was kind of a surreal moment — simply wonderful." Ahead of the festival, the filmmaker said that she was "insanely happy" to have her film "Sound of Falling" selected in the main competition lineup at the Cannes Film Festival. " It's a filmmaker's dream!" German directors at Cannes have been, as the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung noted sardonically, "at times harder to find than a decent lunch for less than €20." This year, the country was also represented by Fatih Akin, whose historical film "Amrum" screened out of competition, and Christian Petzold, whose feature "Mirrors No. 3" was selected for the Directors' Fortnight, an independent sidebar at the Cannes festival. But Schilinski was the only German director with a film in the main competition, the first since Maren Ade caused a stir at the 2016 festival with "Toni Erdmann." Portrait of four generations "Sound of Falling" is set on a farm in a small village in northeastern Germany. It follows the lives of four generations of women living on the farm, interweaving their stories by jumping back and forth among the different timelines until the lines between them blur. What starts as a portrait of four generations becomes a sweeping depiction of a century. "As we went through the rooms of the farmhouse, we could sense the centuries," said Schilinski. "It brought up a question I've had since childhood." She explained that as a little girl growing up in a prewar apartment building in Berlin, she often wondered, "What happened between these walls in the past? Who has sat right in the spot where I'm now sitting? What fates played out here? What did the people who lived here experience and feel?" Her film is an attempt to imagine answers to those questions. 'Sound of Falling' focuses on four generations of women to depict a century of history Image: Neue Visionen Filmverleih 'Sound of Falling' focuses on female gaze As with Schilinski's 2017 debut film, "Dark Blue Girl," a psychodrama about a complicated family dynamic, this latest work focuses on a female perspective, relating events from the points of view of women. Schilinski said the female gaze was very important to her and co-writer Louise Peter because it's so rare in films. "The film is very much about gazes, the gazes that women have been exposed to over the course of a century, how it feels today and also how it's carried on and burned into the body," the director explained. The female gaze in 'Sound of Falling' Image: Neue Visionen Filmverleih Schilinski's career path seems to have almost been predestined: Her mother is a filmmaker who took her along on film shoots, and she started acting for film and television while still at school. Then she did film business internships, worked as a casting agent, traveled through Europe and worked as a magician and fire dancer for a small traveling circus. After studying screenwriting at the Hamburg Film School, she settled in Berlin and began working as a freelance screenwriter for film and television. Schilinski attracted some attention when "Dark Blue Girl" was screened at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, and her career is likely to get a further boost with the Jury Prize for her latest film in Cannes. "Sound of Falling" is due for release in German cinemas on September 11. This article was originally written in German. It was updated on May 26 to reflect Mascha Schilinski's win of the Jury Prize.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sound of Falling' Review: A Haunting Meditation on Womanhood and Rural Strife That Heralds the Arrival of a Bold New Talent
It's not every day you see a movie that resembles nothing you've quite seen before, making you question the very notion of what a movie can be. And yet German director Mascha Schilinski's bold second feature, Sound of Falling (In Die Sonne Schauen), is just that: a transfixing chronicle in which the lives of four girls are fused into one long cinematic tone poem, hopping between different epochs without warning, painting a portrait of budding womanhood and rural strife through the ages. The closest thing that comes to mind is probably Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, although this is Malick by way of Jane Campion and Michael Haneke, shifting between fleeting coming-of-age moments and scenes of resolute darkness and human cruelty. At two and a half hours, and without an easily discernible narrative throughline, Sound of Falling is arthouse filmmaking with a capital A that will best appeal to patient audiences. They will be rewarded by a work that reminds us how the cinema can still reinvent itself, as long as there are directors like Schilinski audacious enough to try. More from The Hollywood Reporter Lynne Ramsay, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson Toast 'Die, My Love' at Cannes Dinner Hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and Longines Can Cannes Help California Get Its Groove Back? Cannes: 'The Creep' Remake Sells for U.K. (Exclusive) Co-written with Louise Peter, the movie's collage-like structure tells four simultaneous stories though a series of fragments or snaphots (cameras of all types are depicted and used on screen), spanning a timeframe from the early 20th century all the way to the present. Set in the same massive farmhouse that passes down from one family to another, the film never strays too far from its main location, venturing out to wander the nearby fields or dip into a picturesque river separating East and West Germany. Characters come and go over the years, as cinematographer Fabian Gamper (shooting in the box-like 1:1.37 format) creeps around the house like a ghost discreetly recording events as they happen, catching moments of torment and flashes of occasional humor. Scenes become memories in other scenes, passed on from the living to the dead and back again, cut together by editor Evelyn Rack so that they resonate more as time goes by. The effect can be disorienting at first, and Sound of Falling is a film whose power slowly accumulates as it progresses. The quartet of girls we follow — Alma (Hanna Heckt) after the turn of the last century, Erika (Lea Drinda) after WWII, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the GDR of the 1980s and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the present — are not all related, though they share a common history that hangs over the house as both a blessing and a curse. There is trauma in their lives — sometimes deep unforgettable trauma that never seems to leave the Altmark region where their farm is located. But there is also beauty and self-discovery. Schilinski has essentially made four bildungsroman movies at once, each of them about young women awakening to the possibilities, as well as to the limits, that life has to offer them. The scenes involving Alma and Erika, both of whom grow up in worlds dominated by a solemn patriarchy and plagued by hardship, feel like they were drawn from period horror movies. The pale blonde Alma is obsessed by a dead sibling whose portrait rests on a mantle honoring the family dead. In the picture, the girl's corpse is propped up on a sofa alongside some of her favorite toys, in a style of post-mortem photography popular at the time. Decades later, Erika bears a carnal attraction to her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), an amputee who lies withering in pain in his bedroom. Much later we learn how he lost his leg as a teenager, in a startling scene of parental savagery. At first blush, the stories of Angelika and Lenka seem altogether more pleasant, revealing how life in their agricultural community did grow somewhat easier over time. This doesn't mean the girls don't have their own demons to face, whether it's Angelika's burgeoning sexuality and disturbing relationship with her uncle (Konstantin Lindhorst), or the melancholic Lenka's friendship with a neighboring girl (Zoë Baier) trying to get over the death of her mother. Schilinski finds powerful visual hooks to connect the characters across the decades. They make the same gestures, witness the same things — many scenes are shot from their POVs, through windows, doorways and keyholes — and sometimes live out parallel stories, as if their bodies were marked by the wounds and revelations of earlier times. With its epic scope and precisely drawn figures in the countryside, the film has the weight of a hefty 19th century agrarian novel. But it's told as a pure work of stream of consciousness, as if Virginia Woolf had decided to rewrite a book by Thomas Hardy. This could prove frustrating for viewers looking to latch on to a single plotline, or even multiple plotlines that merge together seamlessly as an ensemble piece. Sound of Falling (whose German title translates to Looking into the Sun) offers up an altogether different kind of storytelling, made up of momentary sensations, images, emotions and sounds that gradually form a bigger picture. That picture depicts a world where young women face untold obstacles from one epoch to another, including rape, the death of loved ones, forced sterilization, incest, and a form of rural slavery and prostitution, yet eventually emerge as arbiters of their own fates. Schilinski doesn't spare us all their pain and suffering, nor does she hide the joy and wonder they sometimes experience. Her brave girls carry their forebearers within them from one generation to the next, surging toward the future both damaged and victorious. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sound Of Falling' Filmmaker Mascha Schilinski On Origins Of Her Generational-Trauma Epic
Despite a small turnout by press this morning for the first feature press conference of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, journos in the room gave Sound of Falling filmmaker Mascha Schilinski and cast thunderous applause. The wonder in Cannes is the titles we never see coming, which mushroom into must-haves for distribs, not to mention the entry of a fresh cinematic voice on the global stage. More from Deadline 'Sound Of Falling' Review: Mascha Schilinski's Superb Feature Is A Masterclass In Ethereal, Unnerving Brilliance – Cannes Film Festival Cannes One To Watch: German Filmmaker Mascha Schilinski Talks Buzz Movie 'Sound Of Falling', Which Was Snapped Up Early By Cannes & MK2 As A Bold New Voice Two-Time Palme D'Or Winner Ken Loach Shares Open Letter Remembering Palestinian Journalist Fatima Hassouna & Calls For An End To The Violence In Gaza The German movie follows four girls during four different time periods — the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s and present day. The entire movie takes place on a German farm, and these young women's lives are interconnected through time, space and generational trauma. When it came to the inspiration for the movie, which Deadline's Damon Wise calls 'an all-timer,' Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter came across a photo of three women from the 1920s. 'It was a very modern photo. We got the impression these women were looking straight into our eyes, the filmmaker said. 'We felt the melancholy they suffered from in their past. We thought, 'Let's dig into their history.'' Sound of Falling reps her sophomore directorial. RELATED: Originally the movie had a long working title, however, Schilinski and Peter settled on Sound of Falling. 'People fall from one era into another, some of the characters fall. It struck us as perfect,' said Schilinski. 'Several things happened in this place,' she added, referring to the pic's farm locale. ' We thought maybe someone is the room was using her Google phone, another woman lived in that room. … We have this idea that trauma goes from one generation to the next. We don't have access to these traumas anymore, but something remains in people's hearts.' RELATED: Is it possible for these protags to break free of generational trauma? 'We asked ourselves this very same question,' Schilinski said. 'We don't think that it's really the backdrop that plays a part. We looked into the traumas which could have occurred. When you talk about trauma that dates back to ancestry, it's usually the War. But we weren't interested in major events like war but smaller ones — misfortunes, the feelings that sometimes have a tremendous impact on a character and that people don't talk about it.' Said actress Lena Urzendowsky, who plays Angelika in the movie: 'Mascha and Louise's screenplay was sufficiently intelligent for us to feel what the other characters were going through. We had a connection to the place which transpired in our acting.' RELATED: Full List Of Cannes Palme d'Or Winners Through The Years: Photo Gallery Actress Susanne Wuest was greatly inspired by the box of photos the filmmaker provided of the women who lived on the farm. 'When you see the film, there are ghosts that go both ways,' she said. 'I instinctively picked one up. I thought it was super spooky and scary. You can sense history and not be affected. A room can hold a history of a family.' MK2 has world rights to the Competition film, which Deadline's Andreas Wiseman reports has spurred great interest from buyers. Best of Deadline Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far 'Bridgerton' Season 4: Everything We Know So Far
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sound of Falling' Review: Shattering, Century-Spanning Tapestry of Female Unrest Shoots Mascha Schilinski Into the Big Leagues
An ominous droning rush swarms the soundtrack at several points in 'Sound of Falling,' like the growing momentum of weight meeting gravity, and it's presumably this recurring aural motif that gives Mascha Schilinski's exquisite sophomore feature its otherwise vague English-language title. It bears no relation to the film's original German appellation, which translates even less meaningfully as 'Staring Into the Sun,' and if it seems this was a hard work to title altogether, that's because it trades in feelings and experiences at once everyday and ineffable. Intricately braiding the lives of four generations of girls, living (if they're not dying) through different eras on the same forbidding farmstead in northern Germany, Schilinski has constructed a haunted-house story of unique and devastating proportions, essaying a litany of historical cruelties visited on women throughout the 20th century, up to a present day in which much has changed but the song remains the same. Formally rigorous but not austere, shot through with dark humor and quivering sensual intensity, 'Sound of Falling' marks a substantial step up in ambition and execution from Schilinski's promising but comparatively modest 2017 debut 'Dark Blue Girl,' and with an unexpected but fully earned slot in the main competition at Cannes, vaults the 41-year-old Berliner immediately to the forefront of contemporary German cinema. More from Variety Media Capital Technologies Backing Financier Head Gear in New Partnership (EXCLUSIVE) Trans Love Story 'Lala & Poppy' From Veteran Producer Bobby Bedi Heads to Cannes Film Market (EXCLUSIVE) Is Mubi Really Worth $1 Billion? Inside Efe Cakarel's Plan to Make the Global Streamer Cooler Than A24 Commercially, deft handling by discerning arthouse distributors will be required to draw audiences to a knotty, novelistic work that is, in the most rewarding possible way, difficult to package or summarize. Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter's sinuous original screenplay comprises four narrative strands, each already rife with its own enigmas, ambiguities and floating shifts in perspective; woven together in largely impressionistic order, they begin to reflect and resemble each other in complex, telling ways. Collectively they form a hydra-headed evocation of young womanhood in which the past does little to prepare each successive generation for bruising first encounters with desire, abuse and mortality — and where, in a world still ruled by violent patriarchy, what doesn't kill you makes you more cautious. It begins with a fragment from the sparsest of the four, a snapshot of pitiless rural routine that directly colors the stories preceding it and succeeding it chronologically. Red-headed teenager Erika (Lea Drinda) is introduced hobbling down a dark farmhouse corridor on one leg, supported by crutches, as her father boorishly calls outside for her to come and tend to the pigs. But she's merely play-acting: Her left leg is tied up under her dress, and the crutches belong not to her but her bed-ridden amputee uncle Fritz (Martin Rother). When she drops the ruse and goes to her father, he strikes her brutally in the face; small wonder she entertains private fantasies of disability. Her reaction to the blow is a small, rueful smile, directed straight at DP Fabian Gamper's hovering, ambiguously positioned camera — not the first time one of Schilinski's female protagonists will silently break the fourth wall, inviting the audience's gaze in an environment that otherwise grants them little care or scrutiny. Living in the 1940s under the close shadow of the Second World War, Erika is a descendant of Alma (nine-year-old Hanna Heckt, remarkable in her big-screen debut), the inquisitive, flaxen-haired youngest daughter of a stern farming family at the turn of the century. Alma, too, is given to mischief and whimsy, qualities in desperately short supply in a household mostly characterized by physical and psychic anguish. Through her eyes, we learn the savage truth of how the young, once-strapping Fritz (Filip Schnack) lost his leg, and probe behind the mournful demeanor of stricken, old-before-her-time domestic servant Trudi (Luzia Oppermann) — one of many maids forcibly sterilized by her employers, 'to be made safe for the men.' Though she only understands some of what she witnesses through keyholes or coy adult allusion, Alma's innocence darkens over the course of the summer, by the end of which she herself expects to die. In the other direction, the family tree extends to Erika's sister Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), introduced in the early 1980s as mother to restless teen Angelika (a superb Lena Urzendowsky), whose growing sexual awakening is exploited by her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and more tenderly pursued by her gawky cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann). The latter is the only male character to contribute to a running voiceover that otherwise alternates between the female principals, sometimes looking back on their youth with some distance, and a more omniscient narrator. In the present day, the farm is a summer home for a middle-class Berlin couple and their daughters Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) and Nelly (Zoë Baier) — seemingly unrelated to the previous residents, though in time, the house's history of tragedy and feminine anxiety appears to intrude on them too. Shooting in a suitably confined Academy ratio, Schilinski and Gamper visually unite the film's switching eras with grainily textured compositions that evoke faded family photos in some shots and antique mirror oxidation in others — all in a palette of dulled blacks and tea-stained browns only sporadically leavened by a breath of stonewashed blue. This distressed imagery provides an apt aesthetic counterpart to storytelling in which each scene is presented as a subjective memory, with some details blurred and others pin-sharp. The camera is watchful but sometimes hesitantly positioned, as if trying to recall the layout of a part-forgotten scene. Sonically, too, 'Sound of Falling' sews its timelines together with patterned bursts of static and silence — and one repeated needle-drop in 'Stranger,' a woozy, warily lovestruck ballad by contemporary singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff, with its own expression of out-of-body emotional conflict. ('There is something moving against me,' she sings. 'It's not in line with the world I know.') No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on. If these walls could talk, this startling film concludes, they'd probably stay silent. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Competition Starts With an Instant Sensation as ‘Sound of Falling' Premieres to Rave Reviews and Palme d'Or Buzz
German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski's 'Sound of Falling' debuted on Wednesday afternoon in Cannes, the first film from the competition slate to premiere at the Grand Lumière. If the rave reviews are any indication, it appears the festival already has a major Palme d'Or contender on its hands. The drama is Schilinski's follow-up to her 2017 debut 'Dark Blue Girl.' While 'The Sound of Falling' was met with a standing ovation on the shorter side for the festival (three-and-a-half minutes), the post-screening reaction was more or less hobbled by the theater turning over for the next showing: Tom Cruise's 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' premiere. Schilinski also quieted the audience down when she took the microphone to thank her cast. The crowd continued to cheer as they exited the theater to make way for the 'Mission' premiere. More from Variety 'Sound of Falling' Review: Shattering, Century-Spanning Tapestry of Female Unrest Shoots Mascha Schilinski Into the Big Leagues Media Capital Technologies Backing Financier Head Gear in New Partnership (EXCLUSIVE) Trans Love Story 'Lala & Poppy' From Veteran Producer Bobby Bedi Heads to Cannes Film Market (EXCLUSIVE) Variety's Guy Lodge hailed the movie as a 'shattering' epic that sends its director 'into the big leagues' with an 'astonishingly poised and ambitious second feature.' Film critic Alison Wilmore wrote for Vulture that 'we may have already seen the best movie at Cannes.' IndieWire's David Ehrlich praised the movie as a 'mesmerizing stunner.' Sensational raves followed in The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian and more. The movie is seeking U.S. distribution. Schilinski's film centers on four girls — Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka — who each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany. 'As the home evolves over a century, echoes of the past linger in its walls,' the film's synopsis explains. 'Though separated by time, their lives begin to mirror each other.' In an interview with Variety ahead of the premiere, Schilinski said, 'This film is, above all, about remembering. About how we remember and how we perceive. At first, you're trapped in the moment and in your body, but over time, when you look back, you're able to look at yourself from the outside.' As she and co-writer Louise Peter penned the screenplay together on a farm, Schilinski said she was struck by 'the simultaneity of time.' She recalled: 'There are spirits and ghosts in us, and ghosts that live on this old farm. When you enter a room, you don't know what happened there, but you still feel it … This place had been abandoned for 50 years, but everything was still there, including a spoon a farmer put down for the last time.' Thus, 'Sound of Falling' explores how memories shape our destinies. 'They burn under their skin,' Schilinski said. 'When we talk about memory, what can we actually access? Which parts of our past? Because of the way memory works, sometimes it's not the biggest traumas or biggest events that condition us the most.' 'Sound of Falling' is produced by Maren Schmitt, Lucas Schmidt and Lasse Scharpen (for Studio Zentral) with ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel (Burkhard Althoff and Melvina Kotios) and funded by Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM), Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM) and Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF). MK2 is representing the international sales rights. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
