"I was afraid I'd misheard," said the 41-year-old director and screenwriter Mascha Schilinski when her film was named Jury Prize winner at the Cannes International Film Festival. "It was kind of a surreal moment — simply wonderful." 

Ahead of the festival, the filmmaker said that she was "insanely happy" to have her film "Sound of Falling" selected in the main competition lineup at the Cannes Film Festival. " It's a filmmaker's dream!"

This year, Germany was represented by Fatih Akin, whose historical film "Amrum" screened out of competition, and Christian Petzold, whose feature "Mirrors No. 3" was selected for the Directors' Fortnight, an independent sidebar at the Cannes festival.

But Schilinski was the only German director with a film in the main competition, the first since Maren Ade caused a stir at the 2016 festival with "Toni Erdmann."

Portrait of four generations

"Sound of Falling" is set on a farm in a small village in northeastern Germany. It follows the lives of four generations of women living on the farm, interweaving their stories by jumping back and forth among the different timelines until the lines between them blur. What starts as a portrait of four generations becomes a sweeping depiction of a century.

"As we went through the rooms of the farmhouse, we could sense the centuries," said Schilinski. "It brought up a question I've had since childhood." She explained that as a little girl growing up in a prewar apartment building in Berlin, she often wondered, "What happened between these walls in the past? Who has sat right in the spot where I'm now sitting? What fates played out here? What did the people who lived here experience and feel?"

Her film is an attempt to imagine answers to those questions.

'Sound of Falling' focuses on female gaze

As with Schilinski's 2017 debut film, "Dark Blue Girl," a psychodrama about a complicated family dynamic, this latest work focuses on a female perspective, relating events from the points of view of women. Schilinski said the female gaze was very important to her and co-writer Louise Peter because it's so rare in films.

"The film is very much about gazes, the gazes that women have been exposed to over the course of a century, how it feels today and also how it's carried on and burned into the body," the director explained.

Schilinski's career path seems to have almost been predestined: Her mother is a filmmaker who took her along on film shoots, and she started acting for film and television while still at school. Then she did film business internships, worked as a casting agent, traveled through Europe and worked as a magician and fire dancer for a small traveling circus. After studying screenwriting at the Hamburg Film School, she settled in Berlin and began working as a freelance screenwriter for film and television.

Schilinski attracted some attention when "Dark Blue Girl" was screened at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, and her career is likely to get a further boost with the Jury Prize for her latest film in Cannes.

"Sound of Falling" is due for release in German cinemas on September 11. 

This article was originally written in German. It was updated on May 26 to reflect Mascha Schilinski's win of the Jury Prize.