Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the movie awards season’s most intriguing scripts continues with Mascha Schilinski‘s Jury Prize-winning feature at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Sound of Falling (Original title: In die Sonne schauen), an impressionistic drama that chronicles the intertwined lives of four generations of women inhabiting the same farm in the Altmark region of northern Germany.
The film is Germany’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Oscars. It follows a non-linear narrative, a sensory tone poem exploring how intergenerational trauma and the weight of history linger within the walls of a single homestead.
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The film avoids a traditional chronological plot, instead utilizing a fractured structure to explore the “simultaneity of time levels,” as Schilinski put it. The narrative follows four protagonists, each separated by decades but linked by the farm, which is set in a historically turbulent region near the River Elbe, a former Iron Curtain border. The protagonists are Alma (Hanna Heckt) in the 1910s, Erika (Lea Drinda) in the 1940s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the 2020s. Though separated by time, their lives mirror each other, revealing “shared secrets that have been kept hidden.”
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The cycle of violence and deep-seated family desperation forms the essence of the “tiny quiet tremors” the script seeks to capture. The action moves fluidly between these eras, observing how the characters “simply live in their worlds,” treating even cruel or strange events as “simply everyday life.”
Co-written by Schilinski and Louise Peter, Sound of Falling is described as an attempt to track down the “gaps in people’s felt experience for which there are no words.” The core of the film is its focus on the female gaze — a perspective mostly absent from historical documentation. The filmmakers conducted research that uncovered disturbing historical facts, such as accounts of dairy maids who “had to be ‘adjusted’ so that they were harmless to the men,” leading one maid to reflect that she had “lived completely in vain.” The characters, therefore, are often not living but merely surviving, a plight shared by many people even today.
The film explores the profound themes of intergenerational trauma and the presence of the gaze of death, intertwining these women. The characters are perpetually on a quest for “the longing to exist in this world for once without anything having preceded them.” This yearning is contrasted with the body’s betrayals, such as a blush that makes one’s internal shame visible. Ultimately, the film suggests that while words and sentences fade from memory, the core feelings—the unaddressed historical traumas and familial cruelties—remain present, perpetually echoing within the walls of the Altmark homestead.
Read the screenplay below: