In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling)

A secluded four-sided farmhouse in the Altmark. For over a century, its walls have absorbed the lives of the people who lived here – their tastes, their being in time. IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN (LOOKING INTO THE SUN) tells the stories of four women from different eras – Alma (1910s), Erika (1940s), Angelika (1980s), and Nelly (2020s) – whose lives are eerily intertwined. Each of them experiences her childhood or youth on this farm, but as they move through their own present, traces of the past reveal themselves – unspoken fears, repressed traumas, buried secrets. Alma discovers that she was named after her deceased sister and believes she must follow the same fate. Erika loses herself in a dangerous fascination with her wounded uncle. Angelika wavers between a longing for death and a hunger for life, trapped in a fragile family system. And Nelly, growing up in apparent security, is haunted by intense dreams and the unconscious weight of the past. When a tragic event on the farm repeats itself, the boundaries between past and present begin to blur.

Mascha Schilinski has created a sweeping, epochal film with IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN – a grand tour into the most delicate branches of the emotional worlds of these four women. The film also points to our present and our acutely changing experience of history and epochal shifts. A work that drills deep into our perception and stages its sensation where feelings are at their most fleeting: in the quickly fading sense of time.

Opening film of the Cannes Film Festival 2025.