Hyde Park Pick: Sound of Falling

Whilst decades separate the girls, resonances between their lives emerge: their desires and distress, secrets and truths, encounters with another’s gaze and defiant gaze in return.

The farm is an important starting point in the story and where Director Mascha Schilinski began conceiving the work. Located in the Altmark region in the deep countryside halfway between Berlin and Hamburg, Schilinski was staying there with co-writer Louise Peter during one summer, both developing independent projects. The long summer days made space for thought and collective questioning, including who or what lived in this place?

“The Altmark was always a very rural part of Germany. Not much happens there, but it still carries the load of Germany’s complex history. It is bordered by the river Elbe, which in WWII marked the final reach of the Russian army’s advance and after the war became part of the Iron Curtain between East and West Germany. After the fall of the Wall, people from Berlin looked for weekend retreats there, looking for somewhere empty and quiet.

Because the farm we stayed in stood vacant for 50 years, we were able to walk through the individual rooms and walk through its past. You could see where the farmer put his spoon down for the last time. Everything was still in place.” Mascha Schilinski

The product of this exploration of ideas and the past through a fixed space is an exceptionally powerful piece of contemporary feminist filmmaking. The different narrative threads sensitively unveil varied truths about the lives of everyday Germans lived over a hundred-year period.

Layered on top of that is the particular pressures faced by the women in these spaces as they work to exist in an aggressively patriarchal space.

The visual consideration given to the storytelling means that the harshness of story is balanced by a rich visual experience for the audience, one that at times even comes to feel romantic and dreamlike. This feels like a nod to the rich inner lives of the characters and is a sharp reminder to audiences that this is a work of art, a work of feeling and emotion, whatever historical facts and waypoints may have been plotted in the film's 155-minute runtime. It is a film to be felt and experienced, and whilst that makes it hard at times, it’s also the extreme pleasure of the film.

Sound of Falling is showing at HPPH from Fri 27 Mar. You can find times & tickets here.