Winner: Special Jury Prize, 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Germany’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards

Alongside the river Elbe between Berlin and Hamburg, a family farm sits in a particularly tumultuous region, one that saw both world wars and defined East and West Germany. Mascha Schilinski’s SOUND OF FALLING braids together the lives of four generations of inhabitants of this place: Alma (Hanna Heckt) in the early 20th century, Erika (Lea Drinda) in the 1940s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the present. As time moves both forwards and backwards throughout the encampment, where walls can all but talk, each character faces her unwitting, often unfortunate, fate and the home itself becomes a mirror to the nation’s brutal and tormented history.

As ferocity and violence, usually at the hands of men, hides around every corner regardless of the decade, Schilinski’s characters struggle to define themselves in societies that see them as expendable servants, spoils of war, or sexual playthings. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Schilinski’s sophomore film is rich with craft and haunting detail. Co-written with Louise Peter and shot by Fabian Gamper whose camera moves like a ghost through the farm’s nooks and crannies, Sound of Falling is a sombre, poetic, and skilled chronicle that reverberates beyond its volatile confines.

—Dorota Lech, Toronto International Film Festival guide