The Cannes film festival has an early frontrunner for its top prize in the form of a haunting German film exploring female trauma across four generations that one review called “ethereal, unnerving brilliance”. “The Sound of Falling” by Mascha Schilinski follows four girls growing up on a farm in northeast Germany from the World War I era to present day, punctuated by their inner-most thoughts. “We may have already seen the best film at Cannes this year,” said Vulture’s reviewer Alison Willmore.

The film weaves in and out of the 1910s, 1940, 1980s and present day, with a nearby river providing summer swims but also luring in the characters with a disturbing sense of doom. The Guardian likened it to a “ghost story or even a folk-horror”, while The Hollywood Reporter said it was a “movie that resembles nothing you’ve quite seen before”. It said it felt “as if Virginia Woolf had decided to rewrite a book by Thomas Hardy” -- the former being a feminist author who walked into a river with her pockets filled with stones to take her own life.

‘Radical liberation’

The film centers on the female experience in a year when the Cannes Festival is seeking to better respond to the #MeToo movement. “We weren’t so much interested in major events like war, but perhaps smaller events, little feelings, misfortunes, that sometimes can have a tremendous impact on a character,” Schilinski told journalists.

German director and screenwriter Mascha Schilinski poses during a photocall for the film "In die Sonne schauen" (Sound of Falling).

In the 1910s, Alma -- a little girl with coiled white-blonde braids played by 10-year-old actor Hanna Heckt -- seeks clues from her elder siblings on how to make sense of life. In one off-camera comment, she notes that the family’s young maid was taken away and made infertile so farm hands could sexually abuse her unhindered.

“The servants were sterilized so you could sleep with them without there being any risk for the men. This really did exist,” the filmmaker said. “I thought, how can you survive on a daily basis when you have the impression that you’re wasting your life?” “Many women in this film do not choose death -- but it’s often the only possibility they can think of to reach radical liberation,” she added.

More to come

Screen Daily, which draws from a dozen reviews for each film, on Friday showed “Sound of Falling” had received some of the best reviews so far. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecutors”, a Soviet-era warning about despots, has also been popular. Some viewers have also been excited about “Sirat”, Franco-Spanish filmmaker Olivier Laxe’s Morocco-set road trip starring real-life ravers and featuring a trance music soundtrack.

But with competition screenings just three days in and continuing until May 22, other hot contenders are still to premiere in the coming days. They include Wes Anderson’s latest madcap comedy-drama “The Phoenician Scheme”, and repeatedly detained Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s mysterious “A Simple Accident”. On the last day of the competition, on Friday next week, two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will show the festival “Young Mothers”, the story of five young mothers staying in a maternity home.--AFP