While on a visit to Paris, where her breakthrough film Sound of Falling [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Mascha Schilinski
scheda film] opened the 30th Paris German Film Festival (read the article), Masha Schilinski broke down her fascinating piece of work for Cineuropa––a film that was awarded in Cannes, in the running for the Oscars, and which will be released in French theatres by Diaphana on 7 January.

Cineuropa: How did you get the idea of a film bringing together a place, a farm in Altmark, and a story taking place over more than a century?
Mascha Schilinski: My co-writer Louise Peter and I were wondering about how events register in our body over time, without us having access to them anymore. Some events took place long before our birth, and are for instance linked to shameful moments, a shame so great that we can’t even talk about it on our deathbed and that registers in our body. We first thought it wasn’t a terribly cinematic subject, that perhaps we should make it into a sound installation or a novel, until we arrived on this farm abandoned for 50 years. There, all of a sudden, we felt as though we’d found a receptacle in which we could show all the echoes of these temporalities.

How did you develop the script and select the four time periods that weave the film together?
This farm was built in 1904, but for production reasons, we couldn’t film its construction. We therefore decided to let the family in this farm live for about ten years, and to start the narrative at that point in time, around 1914. Then, we systematically skipped one or two generations, so that the characters in each part could not have known those of previous generations. It was very important so that we could indeed see what registers in the body and creates resonances once we no longer know the people who came before us. This is how this order of sequences was structured: the 1910s, the 1940s, the 1980s and our current time. Writing the script took almost four years.

Why did you choose to have female main protagonists?
At first, we also had male protagonists and we didn’t at all intend to make the film from a female perspective. But during our research on a region that there is little documentation about, we stumbled upon two books in which two women talk about the lost paradise of their childhood. As we read these stories, certain short sentences, dropped in casually, intrigued us, such as “we had to make sure that the maid would no longer be dangerous for the men”, or a servant saying “I’ve lived for nothing”. These sentences shocked and really moved us. We tried to understand what was hiding behind them and, little by little, we got to this idea of wanting to talk about the way women have been perceived over a hundred years.

What were your visual and sound choices in order to transcribe to the screen this sensitive perception of the past?
Memory really isn’t reliable. We have memories and our imagination works with those memories, it kind of creates false ones. At the same time, our entire identity is built on these memories. A simple example: we are here, imprisoned in our bodies, and when we remember this situation, we see ourselves, and therefore we immediately come up with images that can’t have existed that way for us, as individuals. We therefore wondered, with my DoP Fabian Gamper, about the way to represent these inaccessible memories, a bit like the face of a dead person that we can no longer reconstitute in our imagination. We worked with old lenses and tried to find technical solutions. As for the sound, I started thinking about it at the writing stage and we thought about it by asking ourselves questions such as “what is the sound of a black hole? Of the stars? Or 1000m under water?” It’s from those questions that we built the sound, because often, the female characters look at the camera, but we don’t see what they see. They see the world, and that world, the universe, responds with these sounds.

How far into areas of uncertainty, the unspoken, the off-frame, did you want to go?
I didn’t impose any strict rules on myself, but I always asked myself very precisely to whom that scene belongs, who is watching it, from what perspective it is seen and to whom the memory belongs. I was also interested in the images we couldn’t see and which are perhaps even more important in the film than the ones we see. It’s as if the characters were digging through their internal matter to search for a puzzle piece that would explain where their pain and shame came from. Of course, they don’t find that piece. However, they do find something else that may explain the secrets whose presence they feel.

A film in black and white, a story in four chapters over a century: was it difficult to find financing?
(Laughs) It was at once not easy at all, and yet still easy. First, the film was officially considered as a debut feature (since Dark Blue Girl [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film] was my graduation film in film school), and for debut features, there are specific funds. The project was very ambitious, but I was lucky to have the shooting location. And the village inhabitants were incredibly helpful: they let me use material, they acted as extras, the oldest village woman translated some texts written in a regional dialect that doesn’t even exist anymore. This film was also made like the ones we make in film school, with a wonderfully devoted team. I was supported from the start by the ZDF as well, and its programme Das kleine Fernsehspiel dedicated to rather experimental works. Then, we got some funds and not others. But the script won, during the Berlinale, a prize that’s prestigious in Germany, which allowed the project to benefit from some attention that undoubtedly helped with financing.

A selection in competition in Cannes, a Jury Prize and now a campaign as Germany’s candidate for the upcoming Best International Film Oscar. What’s next?
I don’t know. I’m continuing to work as much as possible while these huge campaigns are happening. All this attention, it’s a huge gift for all the people who worked for so long on this film. I hope this attention will open some doors for us to carry on searching for innovative narrative forms.

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