Mascha Schilinski’s buzzy Cannes competition title Sound Of Falling has been selected as Germany’s entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 98th annual Academy Awards.
German Films, the country’s national cinema organization, made the announcement this afternoon. The selection jury described the film as “formally uncompromising, emotionally existential, and artistically unique – without any parallel in German and international cinema.”
“Spanning a century, the film interweaves the lives of four women who struggle against confinement, violence, and social constraints,” the jury said. “A work of rare urgency, masterfully directed, poetic, universal, courageous, Sound Of Falling is a physical experience that resonates and burns itself into the memory.”
Set on a secluded four-sided farmstead in the Altmark region, the film follows four women, separated by decades but united by trauma, who uncover the truth behind its weathered walls.
Co-written by Schilinski and Louise Peter, the film is produced by Studio Zentral (Maren Schmitt, Lucas Schmidt, and Lasse Scharpen) with ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel (Burkhard Althoff and Melvina Kotios) and with support from Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM), Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM), and Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF).
The German distributor Neue Visionen will release the film in German cinemas on August 28, 2025. mk2 is handling international sales. Mubi has acquired the rights for North America, the UK, Ireland, India, and Turkey.
Germany has won the Best International Feature Film Oscar three times, with The Lives of Others (2006), and Nowhere in Africa (2002), and most recently, All Quiet on the Western Front (2023). The Tin Drum (1979) won the award under the West Germany banner. Last year, the country submitted Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig. The Iranian filmmaker has been living in Germany since fleeing Iran to avoid trumped-up criminal charges from the country’s authoritarian regime. The film was shortlisted but lost out to The Zone of Interest.
