Audio Interview: Mascha Schilinski & Cinematographer Fabian Gamper – Sound of Falling

It’s only the second day of Cannes competition when the sophomore feature from a virtually unknown German filmmaker arrives, creating one of those disorienting moments where you pause to take stock of what’s unfolding on screen, even as you’re not entirely sure what it is you’re watching. Sound of Falling sees Mascha Schilinski and cinematographer Fabian Gamper crafting a haunting, sensory meditation on intergenerational trauma, memory, and female experience. Set across multiple eras on the same rural German farm, the film traces how pain, repression, desire, and silence echo through generations of women, less as plot than as emotional residue. Its nonlinear, dreamlike structure allows past and present to bleed into one another, suggesting the cyclical nature of history and inherited wounds. Gamper’s ghostly, textured cinematography, marked by floating camera movements, shadow-heavy natural light, fragmented framings and even pinhole POVs (for the techies out there he uses Cooke Speed Panchro Lenses), makes the space itself feel haunted by what it has witnessed. Schilinski created a film that feels like memory itself: elusive, unsettling, and deeply embodied. In an audio interview, I had the chance to ask about if she saw this new film as a rupture with her debut 2017 feature Dark Blue Girl, if some of her ideas were found in post namely the device of inner thoughts in narration and the overall idea of memory here and how it was brought to the screen. Winner of the Jury Prize in Cannes, and Germany’s selection for the Oscars, Mubi releases Sound of Falling in theatres today.