By Entertainment Desk
From Cannes Jury Prize to a sweep of Germany’s Oscars: how Mascha Schilinski’s century-spanning farmhouse drama became one of the defining films of 2026.
Mumbai, May 31, 2026 — Horror films still horrify. And wins awards. They even sweep accolades. And if the image tells tales of dread, the edge of the seat moment arrives. Sound of Falling is one that keeps viewers at the extreme edge of the seat, with eyes sometimes set on exit doors.
Sample and image from the movie that swept German film awards this week. This is the near the opening of Sound of Falling. A child is lying on the floor. He plays dead. A doll clutches a smaller replica of itself. A ghostlike silhouette of a woman hovers at the edge of the frame. A family portrait staged as a premonition. The image sets the tone that never dulls but only gains more intense as minutes become longer and viewers begin sweating.
On Friday night in Berlin, Mascha Schilinski’s haunting intergenerational drama swept the 76th German Film Awards. It bagged 10 Lolas. Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. All in the kitty. The stage confirmed what Cannes first announced to the world a year ago: this is a work of rare and lasting significance.
The ceremony was hosted for the second consecutive year by Christian Friedel. He made his name with The Zone of Interest and Babylon Berlin. The venue was at the Palais am Funkturm. But it belonged entirely to Schilinski. Sound of Falling led the nominations with 11 citations. None was closer. It delivered on that promise with one of the most comprehensive sweeps in the awards’ recent history.
Sound of Falling — released in Germany as In die Sonne schauen — is Schilinski’s second feature. She had made fame with her 2017 debut Dark Blue Girl. The film unfolds entirely within a farmstead in Germany’s Altmark region, tracing four generations of girls — Alma, Erika, Angelika and Lenka — across a century of German history: the 1910s, the 1940s, the 1980s and the present day. Co-written with Louise Peter, it is structured non-linearly, its narratives bleeding into one another across eras, the same walls absorbing different grief.
The film depicts “four young women across four eras of German history.” Their lives are threaded together not by chronology but by inherited suffering and constrained freedom, wrote Variety.
Germany’s independent jury of film experts, in selecting it as the country’s Oscar entry for the 98th Academy Awards, declared it “formally uncompromising, emotionally existential, and artistically unique — without any parallel in German and international cinema.”
Further accolade came from the same panel: it is “a physical experience that resonates and burns itself into the memory.”
Critics have said that Schilinski has achieved something formally bold and emotionally devastating: a ghost story that never once reaches for genre, a period drama that refuses period-drama comfort.
The South China Morning Post described her deployment of a non-linear structure as creating “a quietly profound meditation on the plight of women over the past century,” with each girl’s story becoming a refraction of the others — Alma’s confrontations with death in the 1910s echoing in Lenka’s present-day estrangements without the film ever condescending to explain the connection.
(Sound of Falling is now playing in select international cinemas.)
FAQ:
Q: How many awards did Sound of Falling win at the German Film Awards 2026?
A: Sound of Falling won 10 Lolas at the 76th German Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director (Mascha Schilinski) and Best Screenplay.
Q: What is Sound of Falling about?
A: Directed by Mascha Schilinski, the film follows four generations of young women living in the same farmhouse in Germany’s Altmark region across a century of history — from the 1910s to the present day.
Q: Did Sound of Falling win at Cannes?
A: Yes — the film co-won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, sharing the honour with Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt.
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