Il suono di una caduta

For some time now, German-language cinema has seen films that could be called "Magical Heimatfilms," in reference to the "Magical Realism" of Latin American literature (with Nobel Prize winners Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa as its most important representatives). The Heimatfilm (and certainly the mountain film) was once a genuinely German-language genre and extremely popular with cinema audiences, for example, in the 1950s. However, the old Heimatfilms, such as Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl) (1950) and Grün ist die Heide (1951), were also considered kitschy and deceitful and have been almost completely forgotten in the decades that followed. Today's "magical Heimatfilms" are characterized by magical elements of the inexplicable, but also by a realism that relentlessly exposes the cruelties and darkness of life in the homeland. Examples of this reorientation of the HEIMATFILM genre include "Some day we will tell each other everything" (BERLINALE 2023: nominated for the Golden Bear) and THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (VENICE 2023: nominated for the Golden Lion), as well as more accessible works such as MITTAGSSTUNDE (2022) and WAS MAN VON HIER AUS SEHEN KANNN (2022). The recently released film AMRUM (2025) by GOLDEN GLOBE winner Fatih AKIN also fits well into this series.

With SOUND OF FALLING / IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN by Mascha SCHILINSKI, such a magical Heimatfilm has now also become an award-worthy (Jury Prize) genre entry at the Cannes Film Festival. This alone can be considered a sensational development. But does the film even deserve this honor?

Set on a farm somewhere in the Brandenburg countryside, four stories from four different eras (from the 1910s to the present) are artfully interwoven. The focus is primarily on female characters, whose relationship to one another is unclear. An atmosphere of oppression and sensuality is conjured up through evocative imagery. The audience learns much about the difficult living conditions on the farm and the often cruel entanglements between people. In the 1910s, Low German (Plattdeutsch) was still spoken, and people were cruelly and thoughtlessly mutilated or even posed as dead for family photos. An archaic world, however, that continued even during the Nazi and GDR eras. People suffered horrific accidents or voluntarily took their lives. Interspersed throughout are images of the nearby river and the eels swimming in it, which must have often fed on the watery corpses of history. A cruel world, one that is, however, repeatedly challenged by moments of lust for life and love.

Mascha Schilinski has succeeded in creating a truly remarkable and award-worthy film, one that doesn't aim to tell the audience a coherent story, but rather goes all out to give us, the viewers, a sense of the circumstances from which we have emerged. From Cannes, this film has embarked on a worldwide triumph that will surely bring a few surprises. It's also remarkable, however, that this isn't actually a feature film, but rather a television film from the ZDF editorial team DAS KLEINE FERNSEHSPIEL (THE LITTLE TV PLAY). It was the Cannes Film Festival organizers who first recognized the cinematic potential of this story and brought it to the grand stage on the French Mediterranean. That, too, is remarkable!

.. it's not fully understandable, it's not a Heimatfilm and even not a german historical movie at all. It's about the tragedies of female comming of age stories over one century, broken in little pieces, arranged into a huge Hieronymus Bosch-like kaleidoskop picture. The only constant is the narrow space of a four-side yard whereas the same subjects shown from different temporal angles.

That's what only film can do. No other medium.

There exists a new form of asceticism in cinema, one that practices not restraint, but excess. It drowns the viewer in a deluge of stimuli, hoping the excess of form might conceal the vacuity of its content. One leaves the cinema not with a thought or a feeling, but with a kind of physical exhaustion, as if one had just undertaken an arduous journey without remembering its destination. "Looking into the Sun" is the gleaming, feverish manifesto of this new school, a film presented to its audience as an ordeal.

It is precisely in its strongest moments that the film reveals its decisive weakness. It is, as the benevolent cineaste would call it, a profoundly sensory experience. One does not go to this film; one enters it. You feel the shimmering ozone before a summer thunderstorm, the scratch of a woolen sweater on bare skin, the cool oblivion in the water of a lake. It is a cinematic barefoot path, leading us over shards of beauty, through the mire of repressed memories, and across the moss of comforting moments. The camera clings to surfaces, it breathes textures, it renders sight an almost haptic affair. In these moments, the film is magnificent because it desires nothing more than to place us in a state, a pure, unmediated presence.

Yet this state is fleeting, and what remains is the suffocating pretension with which each of these moments is charged. "Looking into the Sun" is a film so enamored with its own artistry that it forgets to possess a soul. Every shot is a painting, to be sure, but one that arrives already furnished with its own catalog text and art-historical classification. In every pan, in every deliberately unconventional composition, one feels the trembling index finger of the director, whispering in our ear: "Behold, how profound. Feel, how authentic." This intrusive staging of the significant suffocates any possible genuine sentiment at its inception. What was intended as meditation curdles into a pose.

Thus, the work meanders through associative sequences of images that adhere more to a curated Instagram feed than to any dramaturgical necessity. It is a fever dream, yes, but not the authentic kind that befalls us in delirium, revealing truths inaccessible to the conscious mind. It is the contrived, the artificially induced intoxication, in which one can still feel the breath of the pharmacist on one's neck. The images cry out for interpretation but are, in the end, merely empty ciphers basking in the reflection of their own supposed profundity.

In the end, we are left with the paradox of a film that wants us to feel everything, yet leaves us strangely untouched. One has felt the sun, but perceived no warmth. One has seen the pain, but felt no compassion. On this barefoot path, one has indeed felt every stone, but the destination was merely another meticulously lit dead end. "Looking into the Sun" wants to teach us how to see, yet is itself blind to the simple truth that art is born not of intention, but of becoming. A brilliantly photographed, yet ultimately hollow monument to its own ambition.

Bertold Brecht said: a picture of the Krupp steel plant says nothing about the Krupp steel plant.

This pretentious piece of vanity is an overload of pictures and sounds, but it's hollow inside. It transports nothing than its own nothingness camouflaged as importance - with an exclamation mark. I am important! I am art !

But it isn't. Art isn't about barfing out all that comes to your mind. Or filming all that happens. It's about choosing, about selecting, about extracting. Extracting truth. About experiencing something, and then expressing it in the form of art you chose. I don't have the feeling that in this movie anything was felt and expressed by the authors and makers. They more like scientists, inspect, watch and depict animals in a laboratory. Staying neutral and detached.

There is no truth in this, as noise has no truth. You can't even make up your own truth, as your head is full of noise, no space or time for fantasising something up.

You leave the cinema with a headache and a desire to barf it all out again.

Three months later, I can remember maybe one or two scenes of the movie, and not a single emotion. The rest has anhiliated itself.

Bathed in moonlight, soothed by a lullaby, haunted by something intangible, cradled in the wind, buoyed by water, and flying in a dream; four girls are connected through time in the place they inhabit. Alma in the 1900s, Erika in the 1940s, Angelika in the1980s, and Lenka in the present, all occupy the same landscape and their feelings - good and bad, happy and sad - are radiated to the others. Going back and forth in time, the girls struggle to know and be themselves.

"Funny how something can hurt that's no longer there."

Sound of Falling has all the elements I love in film; a camera that moves like a ghost through beautiful scenery, deep conversations, a mysterious storyline that unravels like a puzzle and must be put back together again and again, resonant themes, a director (presumably) not beholden to anyone or anything but their vision, stylish and sexy, actors firing on all cylinders, shocks and twists, flashbacks, wisdom revealed, a culture different from my own, music that transforms mood, compelling characters different from myself, people revealed from different angles, an enthralling story, visions that might be real or imaginary, and more.

Even though director Mascha Schilinski was attending to a sick baby in Germany and not able to attend the North American premiere screening of her film at the Toronto International Film Festival, I stayed as the credits rolled, the intriguing story and scenes turning over in my mind. Sound of Falling won the jury prize at Cannes. The film utilizes natural light and ambient sound, but also mesmerizing songs such as "Stranger" by Anna Von Hausswolff.

"You always see things from the outside, but never yourself."

Thai people believe that the lives and spirits of others can be absorbed and connected in the landscape. This beautiful, moving, and fascinating film is a testament to this.