IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN

Germany

Fiction

Four girls, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka, each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany. As the home has been evolving for over a century, echoes of the past linger in its walls. Though separated by time, their lives begin to mirror each other.

Directed by: Mascha Schilinski
Written by: Mascha Schilinski, Louise Peter
Produced by: Maren Schmitt, Lucas Schmidt, Lasse Scharpen
Cinematography: Fabian Gamper
Editing: Evelyn Rack
Production Design: Cosima Vellenzer
Costume Design: Sabrina Krämer
Make-Up & Hair: Irina Schwarz, Anne-Marie Walther
Original Score: Michael Fiedler, Eike Hosenfeld
Sound: Billie Mind, Jürgen Schulz, Kai Tebbel, Claudio Demel, Sebastian Heyser
Visual Effects: Jan Joost Verhoef
Casting: Karimah El-Giamal, Jacqueline Rietz
Cast: Hanna Heckt (Alma), Lea Drinda (Erika), Lena Urzendowsky (Angelika), Laeni Geiseler (Lenka), Susanne Wuest (Emma), Luise Heyer (Christa), Florian Geißelmann (Rainer), Greta Krämer (Lia), Luzia Opperman (Trudi), Konstantin Lindhorst (young Fritz)

Statement of the director:
Four girls, each living in a different era – from the last century to the present – reside in the same place: a four-sided farmhouse in the German Altmark. Through their eyes, we gain direct insights into their everyday lives. Yet, no matter how diverse their experiences are, beneath their associative flow of images, increasingly discernible connections emerge: patterns of repetition. Four decades of summers gradually merge into an eternal summer, an everlasting now. The film explores what endures within us through the ages, what shapes us, and perhaps even gazes back at us from beyond time, from the future. After extensive research, a screenplay has been developed that delves into the inner experiences of these four girls. In free association, the film shifts back and forth across different times, capturing fragmented personal observations and memories of the characters. It feels as if we are thrown directly into their lives, as if we could see through their eyes. Gradually, the footage assembles before us into a collective stream of memory – a tangible, physical remembrance of ancestors. Images of past experiences suddenly reappear as distorted reenactments in different eras, plunging the characters into a déjà-vu-like trance. What particularly fascinated me is the film’s play with a possibility denied in real life: to peer into a before and an after. It also probes what might be inscribed within our bodies – what long preceded our birth. The small moments in between – the quiet inner tremors that happen in secret, remaining forever unseen because there are no words for them. Moments when the characters slip out of the definable world, unsure whether they merely dreamed the moment or truly experienced it. It’s intriguing where something in their lives becomes autonomous within their bodies – something they cannot access or explain. My co-writer Louise Peter and I initially gathered phenomena and stories that had captured our attention in recent years: a child dreaming things they could not have experienced, yet which mirror the childhood memories of their father; a young boy alone on a large farm, frightened by a loud explosion, running through the woods and fields, only to be found later under a bridge miles away – an old hideout used by family members during World War II, though he had never been there before. A girl working through sexual abuse in therapy, discovering it was her mother’s childhood experience, not her own. A young woman suffering from the same stomach pains as her mother and grandmother, despite all medical tests being normal. A man from the GDR, taking his first trip to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending up in a small French village where he spends his holidays, only to learn decades later that his biological father was a French soldier who had lived in that very village—where he now finds himself for the first time. Experiences and confrontations with such phenomena formed the starting point of our story. We aimed to evoke a sense that the experiences of our ancestors leave traces within our bodies – how deeply are we shaped by events long before our own birth? The film seeks to generate a feeling of connection across time, exploring the dimension of inner spirits, always with the awareness that some aspects will remain in darkness, despite our desire for clarity and understanding. Beyond familial ancestry, growing up in a typical old Berlin apartment, I was as a child haunted by the question of who had lived in the spaces I called home before – what had happened there? What thoughts and feelings did the people who once stood there have? In my previous film, DARK BLUE GIRL, I was already interested in the child's perspective on the world as well as in tactile storytelling – focusing on sensual, bodily moments of perception. In this new project, I wanted to push this physical exploration of memory even further. During the process of writing the screenplay, the central motifs repeatedly included the quiet, almost seemingly incidental moments – scenes where the image seems to seep into the pulse of the characters, like the flickering of sunlight behind eyelids. It is this intangible, floating, and ambivalent quality that interests me narratively, rather than a historically precise, epochal narration. It is a story that offers us the possibility to experience the first emergence of growing up through the sometimes radically subjective perspectives of four girls across different times. For me, it is also a film about the intertwining of imagination and memory itself, as phenomena of our identity formation.
Production:
Studio Zentral
www.studiozentral.de

World Sales, Press/Social Media Agency:
mk2 Films
https://mk2films.com/en/