In Sound of Falling, German director Mascha Schilinski paints an intriguing portrait of four generations of women on the same farm in Altmark, East Germany. Instead of large-scale war stories, the narrative revolves around smaller-scale trauma: the inner turmoil of everyday lives, patriarchal pressure, and the silent traces of history on the psyche.

Schilinski observes her characters with a camera that is sometimes almost ghostly in its presence. In the 1910s, young Alma is confronted with a post-mortem photograph of a deceased sister, and a sense of alienation and dissociation becomes palpable without the film becoming sensational. The women seem to be intuitively connected to each other, while the viewer is slowly drawn into a timeless universe of silence, longing and emotional complexity.

With Sound of Falling, Schilinski delivers a quirky, mystical debut that experiments with memory, time and perspective. It is a film in which the invisible is just as important as the visible, inviting the viewer to reflect on the echoes of the past that still resonate in the present.