The scope and ambition of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (now streaming on Mubi) earned it the Jury Prize at Cannes 2025, sharing the award with the similarly unforgettable Sirat. But where the latter film haunts us with terrifying imagery, Sound of Falling cloaks its audience in a ruminative mood, an invisible weighted blanket of unspoken generational pain endured by four generations of women at a farm in Germany’s Altmark region. Those four narrative strands tangle, overlap and blur together like memories that, like this film, are tough to shake.
The Gist: We open in the 1940s, when Erika (Lea Drinda) straps one leg under her dress and hobbles along on crutches, seemingly as a way of understanding the experience of her uncle, Fritz (Martin Rother), whose left leg ends in a stump above the knee; there’s a degree of sexual curiosity within her obsession.
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