Sound of Falling

Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling (German: In die Sonne schauen) was selected as Germany's official submission for the 97th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category and earned European Film Award nominations for both Best Director and Best Screenwriter at the 2025 ceremony. It is Schilinski's second feature, following Dark Blue Girl (2017), and her first project to receive major international festival programming.

The film premiered at Cannes 2025 in Un Certain Regard and was widely treated as one of the strongest entries in the section that year. The screenplay is by Schilinski with Louise Peter; cinematography is by Fabian Gamper, who shoots the four time periods in distinct visual registers (different lenses, different stocks, different colour grading) to give each layer its own optical identity within the same farmhouse setting.

The cast includes Hanna Heckt, Lea Drinda, Susanne Wuest, Greta Krämer, Lena Urzendowsky and Helena Zengel, Zengel is the same actress who appeared opposite Tom Hanks in News of the World (2020), here returning to a German-language production. The film was shot at a single farm property in Saxony-Anhalt over an unusually long fifty-eight-day schedule, partly to accommodate the seasonal continuity required by the time-period structure. It is regarded as one of the most ambitious German features of 2025 and a defining work of the so-called slow-cinema branch of contemporary German art-house production.