Mascha Schilinski puts girls and women at the centre of family dramas that make few concessions to comfort. We admire her forceful filmmaking, though her insistence on suffering can make distinct lives feel too much alike.
Fi1m perspective
On the German farm in Sound of Falling (2025), Schilinski moves between four generations of women without waiting for us to get our bearings. A century passes, but the suffering keeps returning in different lives. We recommend the film because she makes those connections felt before they are fully understood. Its difficulty is worth accepting, even when the sustained grimness begins to make the women seem too alike.
Her debut feature, Dark Blue Girl (2017), approached family life through a child’s eyes. Her second, Sound of Falling, expands that interest across generations while abandoning the reassurance of events told in order. The interest in young protagonists remains, but the later film asks us to follow several lives at once. We find the jump in ambition persuasive because the girls still matter more than the puzzle.
Cinematographer Fabian Gamper’s older lenses and grainy imagery help suggest memories that cannot quite be trusted. The images work because they do not make the past look settled or safely distant. We were unsettled by Sound of Falling: its restless pictures and insistent sound made the women’s suffering feel close even when their dates were unclear. Schilinski uses sound to suggest what cannot be directly shown or remembered, and gives it as much importance as the images.
She and co-writer Louise Peter are attentive to girlhood, repressed sexuality and the power men exercise over women’s lives. Lena Urzendowsky’s Angelika matters because she remains interesting beyond her place in the family pattern. We want to understand her even when we cannot connect her experiences to everyone else’s. Schilinski’s skill with young performers is especially valuable in a film where the structure could so easily make everyone look interchangeable.
The danger is that so much suffering eventually makes each life look like evidence for the same conclusion. That is where the insistence becomes limiting, and where we would welcome more differences between the women. Start with Sound of Falling, and follow the women before trying to sort out the dates.
Biography
Mascha Schilinski is a German film director and screenwriter. Born in 1984 in West Berlin, she studied screenwriting at the Filmschule Hamburg Berlin, graduating in 2008, and later directing at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg.
She began her career as a casting director and freelance writer. Her first feature, Dark Blue Girl (2017), premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for the GWFF Best First Feature Award. Her second feature, Sound of Falling (2025), which she co-wrote with Louise Peter, screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize.
