Oscar Directors: Schilinski, Mascha–“Sound of Falling” (2025 Best Films)

Oscar Directors: Mascha Schilinski

Mascha Schilinski: Initially, we weren’t concerned about the political aspect at all. What we really wanted to do was to look into the deepest depths of the people who lived there and generate something from those depths.

While we were conducting the research, we realized that there are these concealed stories. There are hidden, untold stories of women, which tend to be neglected because they’re in the margins of history.

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. Fabian Gamper/Studio Zentral

Many of those women could not read or write, and these are often stories that are so shot through with shame that people wouldn’t even talk about them on their deathbed.

Initially, we didn’t intend to make a film told just from the female perspective. We started looking broadly into intergenerational trauma and the way in which trauma is passed down from generation to generation.

However, at one point, we realize that there is a striking distinction. There was a question as to how women were looked at for over a century, and that women were looked at differently than men.

Over the course of time, we realized, as well, the importance because we were looking at this specific location where we shot, in the former GDR, what used to be East Germany. The film became more and more political as we were making it. But that wasn’t our initial intention.

Bodies More Transparent

Schilinski: When my co-author Louisa Peter and me started the writing process on Sound of Falling, we were so curious about the fact that our bodies are more transparent than we are. There’s a line in the film where Angelica, this girl in the 80s, says: ‘It’s so funny that our head blushes when we are full of shame and trying to hide it.’ Our body is so much more transparent than we are.

During research for the film, we found many hidden writings, small half sentences in between descriptions of idyllic childhoods, written in this almost profound tone. In between, there’d be a sentence, like: “Women have to be made so they aren’t dangerous for men.” Or a maid who says: ‘I’ve lived for nothing.”

We could feel these many small, hidden things. And we were interested in these moments. Because when you think of trauma, you often think about war and things like this. But I think there are also little, tiny moments that can happen during a life that are so impactful. There’s a character in the film, living in the present, and she receives a gaze, and this gaze, this look will form her complete life after this.

Stream of Images and Memory

We wanted to create a stream of images so that you have the feeling that everyone who lived at this farm is thinking or dreaming at the same time. It’s about memory itself. How unreliable memory is, and how abrupt, fragmented and also associative. This became the structure for the whole film.

Starting Point

Schilinski: I think there are so different starting points for a film. Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s something that you heard, or sometimes it’s it’s a strong feeling inside of you where you have to find a way, a language for it. In Sound of Falling I was so interested in this invisible thing, these things you have no name for, things you can’t tell about. And trying to find a form to show them, to turn them into a film. I think questions are a good starting point. Not having the answers already but seeing what happens during the process of writing.

Oscar Directors: Schilinski, Mascha–“Sound of Falling” (2025 Best Films)

Oscar Directors: Mascha Schilinski

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