Showtimes
Palm Springs Cultural Center 2/3
By Robert St. Martin & Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/1/26 – Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen) is a hypnotic, time-traversing portrait of four generations of women living in the same isolated German farmhouse over the course of a century. In some ways, the central character is this forbidding old farmhouse in Altmark, in the north of Germany. Director Mascha 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.
The film’s original English title bears no relation to the film’s original German appellation, which translates even less meaningfully as “Staring Into the Sun.” It is a knotty, novelistic work that is difficult to package or summarize. The film was selected as the German entry for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards.
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.
The film 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. Her reaction to the blow is a small, rueful smile, seemingly directed at the camera and the audience.
There follows second narrative in the 1940s under the close shadow of the Second World War. Here we see Erika is a descendant of Alma (nine-year-old Hanna Heckt), the inquisitive, flaxen-haired youngest daughter of a stern farming family at the turn of the century. 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.”
Then we learn about Erika’ sister Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), who is introduced in the early 1980s as the mother of a restless teenage Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky). Angelika’s sexual awakening is exploited by her gawky cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann). At times, he serves as a kind of 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.
Unfolding like a labyrinthine ghost story, Schilinski’s film gradually reveals itself as an unexpected epic about the ways in which women’s lives are shaped by seen and unseen socio-political forces, and in which inherited trauma forges a kinship across generations. With an unsettling score by Anna von Hausswolff that amplifies the unearthly atmosphere of dread and longing, the film reflects place as a palimpsest for family history, connecting cultural memory with shared emotion. Sound of Falling is a cinematic, poetic meditation on the ghosts we carry and those we leave behind.
Schilinski cowrote the film with Louise Peter after spending a summer on a once-abandoned farm in the Altmark region between Berlin and Hamburg, where the film was later set. The duo found an old photograph on the property, showing three women looking directly into the camera. As Schilinski said in a press note for Sound of Falling, the image inspired the premise of the film. “[It was as though] these women were breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at us from the past. That basically gave us the atmosphere that runs through the whole movie,” Schilinski said. “We were interested in the simultaneity of time levels, that in the same place one person does something very mundane and the other perhaps has an existential, life-changing experience.”
Schilinski added that the film is “about the act of remembering itself, about how perception and memory work” especially through subjective points of view and the bodily remnants of inherited dissassociative trauma. “For me, there is always the uncertainty that you can never be sure whether something really happened like this and where dreams and reality intertwine,” she said.
“In many ways, I look at Sound of Falling as my debut film. While I had some experience through my previous project The Daughter, that film was the final project in my third year at the film academy, and it wasn’t supposed to be a feature,” Schilinski said. “The limitations we had to work with [on Sound of Falling] forced us all to use the greatest possible precision and concentration. I had to completely follow my intuition.”
Screenings of Sound of Falling at the Palm Springs International Film Festival are on three dates: SATURDAY, JANUARY 3, 2026, at 7:00 PM, at the Palm Spring Cultural Center 1; SUNDAY, JANUARY 4, 2026, at 3:45 PM, at the ARCO Theatre (Palm Canyon Theatre); and WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2026, at 10:30 AM, at the Palm Springs Cultural Center 2/3. For tickets, go to: https://www.psfilmfest.org/film-festival-2026/schedule?date=2026-01-04.
