Sound of Falling is a 2025 German dramatic film that was co-written and directed by Mascha Schilinski. The feature stars Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler, Susanne Wuest, Luise Heyer and Lea Drinda, and is about four generations of girls connected by a farm in the Altmark, Germany.
Evelyn Rack edited the project, which involved navigating timelines representing the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s and 2020s. Post production included doubling the amount of scenes for the 1940s timeline from existing footage in order to strengthen the 1980s narrative, and adding voiceovers of the four women, as well as a single voice of a male character.
Here, Evelyn shares insight into the project’s challenges and how she helped solve them through the editing process.
Evelyn, you moved around most of the scenes from the script to the final cut. Can you tell us more about how that decision came to be?
"On the very first page of the script, before anything else was written, there was a quote from Bresson: ‘I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.’ From the very beginning, the goal was to create an immersive experience, to dive completely into the perception and inner world of the protagonists. To make a film that wants to be felt and experienced. But when we watched the first rough cut - about three hours long, with the scenes still in script order - it quickly became clear that we needed to recomposite everything in relation to one another. The emotional force wasn’t there yet - the one that would allow you to fully enter the protagonists’ perspectives. It wasn’t even clear that everything took place in the same location, simultaneously across different timelines.
“We had both expected this and had already discussed it before shooting. Even during the writing process, the scenes shifted around constantly. It’s impossible to predict exactly what emotion a scene will evoke, or how it will feel once it takes on new layers through performance, location and its visual design. Since the dramaturgy of Sound of Falling doesn’t follow a plot-driven narrative, but an emotional flow, we had to find the order of scenes together in the edit, in direct dialogue with the material. We were excited for the journey ahead. With no recipe to follow, we relied entirely on our instincts. We had to discover new principles: When and how do we create an emotional current? How do we build that force that feels like falling, where you can’t control where it takes you?
“One example is the character of Angelika in the 1980s. The order in which we move through the film with her has a huge impact on how we perceive her. If we first see Angelika dancing naked in front of the mirror and then flirting with her uncle and cousin, it would be harder to enter her perspective. Her behavior is socially unconventional and therefore raises more questions than it immediately connects us with her. But if we first see her having coffee and cake with her family, annoyed that she now has to wear glasses, and then the uncle puts his hand on her leg. She freezes. She looks to her mother, who turns away, pretending not to see. When the father suddenly appears, Angelika masks the situation with a broad smile. In that order, we understand exactly who Angelika is and what she’s dealing with. We hold the key to her story and can let ourselves fall into it.
“What impresses me deeply is that all the characters, even the secondary ones, and almost all the storylines and scenes that were written by Mascha Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter, made it into the final film. That shows how precise and brilliant the script is.”
Talk about juggling and navigating the four timelines.
“It was extremely challenging to find the right order, not just for one character, but for four main characters and all the secondary ones, who each influence one another depending on where they appear in the film. We had about 90 scenes – which theoretically meant 90 to the power of 90 possible combinations – since the film doesn’t follow a clear narrative or plotline. That’s a number with 90 digits. Obviously, we couldn’t solve that by trial and error, otherwise we’d still be in the editing room today.
“For me, every film functions like its own little universe. Discovering the principles of that universe often gives you the key to how the scenes should be organized. It was the same with Sound of Falling. Since we had no references for how to structure such material, we searched for an inner logic the film could follow – a kind of key to decrypt it. For us, that key was that the form itself had to feel like remembering. We asked ourselves: How do we experience and feel memory? And in Sound of Falling, remembering is a collective act, as if our characters look back together from a million years away.
“In the script, there was a clear trigger for this collective stream of memory: Nelly’s jump from the hayloft in the 2020s. In the book it worked beautifully – parallel to that, Alma and her deceased sister Lia are flying over a field in the 1910s, followed by a scene with a dead neighbor boy. But what was immediately immersive in the book felt too fragmented in the film. Too much was happening at once to allow emotional entry.
“Now the film begins with Erika in the 1940s, limping through the house on crutches, untying her bandaged leg and watching her uncle Fritz sleep. He, too, has only one leg. Erika and her death became a kind of underlying trauma beneath everything. She’s the only character who functions more as a projection surface. In the script, she appeared only three times (in the film, seven) and has no voiceover. Placing her at the beginning strengthened her presence and set the tone: sensuality, resistance, disorientation, the breaking of the fourth wall. A loud roar sounds, and the title appears on black as a divider. After that, we are in the 1910s with Alma, the youngest of our main characters, up to around the 30th minute of the film. She plays a prank on the maid, Berta, with her older sisters and discovers that there had once been another girl named Alma, who looked exactly like her and had died at the same age she is now. Alma is both fascinated and frightened. Staying with her for so long, within a single timeline, feels to me like the boldest decision we made in the editing room. So arrhythmic, so counterintuitive to every rule that seems to exist. Only once we had truly arrived in Alma’s perspective could we shift into the next time layer. We realized that the first noticeable temporal transitions required careful aesthetic shaping. We glide seamlessly from one moment in time to another, guided by sound, gesture and camera movement. After that, it became clear that everything happens in one place, simultaneously across different time levels.
“The deaths, which were partly placed early in the script, are now gathered at the end of the film. When a death appeared too soon, it immediately raised the question of why? The emotional flow broke. We asked ourselves what collective, traumatized remembering feels like? For us, it became a slow unfurling, peeling back layer by layer - a movement of falling, barely controllable or resistible.”
Tell us about your workflow and editing setup.
“We worked from the very beginning in my own editing studio in Berlin using a shared Premiere Teams project. That setup gave us a lot of freedom in the edit. From the start, the process was conceived as a collaboration. Junior editor Billie Mind and I could work on the same project simultaneously. Sound already played an essential role in the screenplay and was deeply woven into its conception. Since Billie is not only an editor, but also a sound designer, she was able to shape the sound design directly within the editing project throughout the process. Working in Premiere also allowed us to create small visual effects during the edit – like the combine harvester driving toward Angelika, or flies crawling across faces. We also used many zoom-ins and subtle image movements, which Premiere handled seamlessly.”
What else did you rely on beyond Adobe Premiere?
“The most important tool was a blank wall, colored index cards - one color for each timeline - and tape. Entirely analog. Like a big puzzle, we could move the pieces physically around the room. Working on the computer, to me, feels more like using a pen to write or a stove to cook - it’s just a tool. The real work happened in the space itself, in the resonance between the material and us.”
How about some of the techniques you employed, like voiceovers, and such?
“On the level of macro-editing – the overall arrangement of scenes in the film – we discovered that, in order not to lose the emotional pull, a jump from one timeline to another had to connect emotionally, thematically and atmospherically. One memory triggers the next, but never arbitrarily. We dive gradually, layer by layer, from the surface into the underlying collective pain. This peeling back is the guiding principle of the edit and of the scene arrangement throughout the film.
“Which memory do we recall first? Where do we instinctively look away? What is revealed? When and how do we find words and explanations? At what point can our characters dare to look, and when must they avert their gaze? The voiceover is therefore not evenly spread across the film. Language – even lost language, the capacity to make sense of experience – evolves. In the shared confrontation, in the exchange of experiences, lies the possibility of recognition and articulation. Bodies become a collective body. Language becomes shared. The further we move into the film, the more intense the voiceover becomes.
“At the beginning, the voiceover simply didn't work. We tried it. The film now starts more restrained, the memories more concrete. The first voiceover emerges with Alma remembering her mother’s caresses, her recognition through a blink of an eye. The form evolves and transforms throughout the film. In the script, this was less clear. Some scenes initially appeared more dreamlike, more removed, and these were shifted to later points in the film.
“For example, it was essential to place all the deaths together at the end.
The order of scenes within these aesthetic-thematic sequences followed a principle in which every piece had to fit together like dominoes. We could cut, for instance, from Angelika and Rainer’s swimming training by the river in the 1980s to the 2020s, when Angelika reflects that she is being watched, to Nelly in the 2020s practicing a handstand in the water and complaining that her mother is not watching. We could cut from the dead grandmother, stones placed on her eyes to ward off the evil eye in the 1910s, to Angelika in the 1980s, receiving stones on her eyes from her mother. Or from Alma in 1910 lying in bed at night, afraid of death, to the 2020s at night, waking from a nightmare.”
“On the level of micro-editing within the scenes, we constantly asked ourselves how we perceive memory ourselves? Take a scene with Angelika in the 1980s. She lies on a porch swing, observing her parents at a garden party. In voiceover, she reflects that she can command her heart to stop beating, but it simply doesn’t obey. It just won’t stop. The camera follows her gaze as she swings. The image tilts, black gaps appear between shots, the picture grows grainy and eventually turns upside down. The editing mirrors the fragmented, layered way memory functions. How a causal feeling can still emerge from fragments. The challenge was always to make it feel organic and natural, never like a formal concept.”
Are there one or two sequences that were particularly challenging?
“One of the biggest challenges was integrating Fritz’s storyline in the 1910s and how he loses his leg, because thematically, it didn’t fit the direct, personal trauma of the girls. In the end, there was only one place for this sequence: after we had fully immersed ourselves in the perspectives of all the main characters. Only then, through Alma’s perspective, do we witness what happens to her older brother, marking the film’s midpoint. From there, we begin to explore the main characters’ pain in depth. Alma’s voiceover, ‘Funny how something can hurt that’s no longer there,’ sets the stage. Only afterwards do we see Angelika crying in bed at night, Alma reenacting her death, and so on. Fritz functions as a hinge between the immersion into individual perspectives and the collectivization of trauma and memory that follows. Finding the right place for his sequence was a long process.
“I particularly love the sequence on Irm’s birthday. She is Angelika’s mother from the 1980s and the sister of Erika from the 1940s, who took her own life in the river. It was hard to feel Irm’s trauma of the suicide of her sister, since we were not directly entering her perspective as we do with the main characters. But to make her inner life tangible felt essential for both the character and the film.
“In editing, we resolved this with haunting, recurring fragments that appear three times throughout the film. These brief memory fragments let us enter Irm’s mind without taking on her perspective as we do with the main characters, offering insight into her emotional world. One example, on her birthday: the village plays a prank on her, the Trabant parked between two trees. Irm discovers it, gets in the car, puzzled. In voiceover, Angelika says their father always tried to make her laugh, but it never worked. As everyone sings and birthday candles burn, champagne splashes against the window, and Irm sits frozen in her car, as if turned to stone. Angelika notices, the sound disappears, a crackling begins. Laughing villagers, clapping, blurred figures. Irm’s disturbed. Cut. An eel in murky water. Cut. Irm’s frozen face. Cut. A group of women enter the river. Cut. Irm. Cut. Erika pauses in the water, turns and looks directly at the camera. Cut.”