Memory really isn’t reliable. We have memories and our imagination works with those memories, it kind of creates false ones. At the same time, our entire identity is built on these memories. — Mascha Schilinski
Director Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling—a collaboration with co-writer Louise Peter and cinematographer Fabian Gamper—illuminates memory’s unreliability with imaginative force and style. This affective incantation of images and narrative voices moves back and forth between the lives of four German girls of different generations in and around a family farmhouse in Altmark. Set during four particular time periods—the dawn of the Great War, the 1940s, the GDR eighties, and today—the girls are never seen together but share an inner disquiet that brings them up short in ways that evoke one of Claire Lispector’s interior monologues:
I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don’t know who, but I don’t want to be alone with that experience… I’m not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen to me, and did I, because I didn’t know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead?
What isn’t imaginary are the epigenetic changes that render forever present the stark traumas faced by the characters in the 1910s—a cursed inheritance navigated by the successive generations of girls with inspiring vitality.
Sound of Falling is now in theaters. See info and links below for details.
SOUND OF FALLING
Written by Louise Peter and Mascha Schilinski
Directed by Mascha Schilinski
Now playing
Royal
11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles
IFC Center
323 Sixth Avenue, New York City
ifccenter.com/sound-of-falling
Mascha Schilinski quotation from Fabien Lemercier, “Director of Sound of Falling,” Cineuropa, October 13, 2025.
Claire Lispector quotation from A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) / The Passion According to G.H., translated by Ronald W. Souse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Copyright © University of Minnesota Press.
Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling / In die Sonne Schauen (2025), from top: Lena Urzendowsky; Hanna Heckt (looking at camera); Greta Krämer; Luzia Oppermann; Sound of Falling posterUrzendowsky; Laeni Geiseler.
Film stills by Fabian Gamper, courtesy and © the photographer, Studio Zentral, and Mubi.
