Film “look into the sun” – Mascha Schilinski: “It’s about how memory works”

Ms. Schilinski, you have “look into the sun” with your second feature film, on this year Cannes film festival had a great success. How was your Cannes experience?

It was great. There were two great weeks I was able to spend with the team and Cast there. It was exciting, there were many appointments, but it was simply beautiful to celebrate this moment with everyone after five years of work that the film had its premiere on this world stage. That was great.

Now everyone knows their name in the industry, now many doors can open. But does such a success also have something challenging?

Yes, so look! It’s so funny, because I’m still the same and I am still sitting at home at the same kitchen table. I don’t feel that. And I give the interviews and don’t read them. I think I haven’t really realized that it arrives out there. It will show what results from it. Of course I hope that doors open. And I hope that doors will also open for other people. For artists who try to walk other ways or who also want to see and make other films. That hopefully it will be easier for you or that more openness will come towards you.

Interview

Imagine / Maurizio Gambarini / Funke Photo Serceses

Mascha Schilinski was born in West Berlin in 1984. After graduation in psychology and various internships in the film area, she worked as a caster for the acting agency »Faces« in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 2008 she completed a screenplay master class at the Hamburg Film School, and in 2012 she began studying director at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy.
Her final film and long film debut »Die Daughter« ran in 2017 at the Berlinale in the Perspective German cinema. “Look in the sun” is her second movie.

Your film is very original. It is realistic, but also metaphysical, is poetic and at the same time historically precise. Tells small individual stories, but also of collective fears, feelings and trauma. How did you get this harmony?

(laughs) We looked: What would we like to see ourselves, what are the pictures that come up? And we tried to write down these images and associate them with each other and to see that a image stream is created, so to speak, that is as if all the ancestors who have lived in this farm or those who will still live there have a dream together. As if they were remembering together. And a memory triggers new associations in the other figure, so that we can never be sure whether what we see is real or not. Even more important in the film than what we see is what we do not see, what is left out. We tell totally elliptical and just associative, mosaic. And it’s about what we remember or how memory works. Therefore, where we no longer reach a memory where something has been lost, because maybe a trauma has happened or because you have displaced something.

Her characters are mainly women and girls who live in four different eras – in the 1910s, 40s, 80s and 2020s – in the Altmark. What inspired you and her co-author Louise Peter to these characters?

We have researched very long, wanted to find out more about this place Altmark. At the beginning it was not intended that we wanted to make a film from a female point of view. There were also male figures, boys, all sorts of things. We wrote many figures that ended up in the film. During the research, we noticed that there is superwented about the women from that time. There were two books that were written from a female perspective and which actually described a bit of the lost paradise of a childhood. In such a bull -like tone, it was described how the laundry is folded, how the father stuffs his pipe, how to rage with the siblings in the hay. And then there were sometimes such small disturbing semi -sentences that were simply written in the same tone and which you could have overruled, but we stumbled across it. For example: the maid still has to be done in such a way that it is harmless to the men. Or a maid said: “I actually lived for nothing.” We asked ourselves: What happened there? However, we did not get any further, could not find out whether this was perhaps a systematic compulsory sterilization that happened there. With the help of the characters, we tried almost as hallucinatively to find out what could have been there. And had the feeling that these perspectives always take place on the edge of history and that we would actually like to get them into the center.

Your script with the Thomas Strittmatter Prize in 2023 had anothern Working title. And from that the film became “looking into the sun”. Why “look into the sun”?

The original title under which we wrote was: “The Doctor Says i’ll be alright, but i’m Feelin Blue.” Everyone said, Mascha, nobody can say that, you can’t do that. The original title of the film is “Sound of Falling”. With the title we also ran in Cannes, that is the international title. But we had the feeling that the German translation was not entirely coherent, and the German rental was not happy with it. After brainstorming in the team, we came up with “look into the sun”. It is difficult to look at the sun and death without it painful. But these women in the film look damn long. In addition, there was a archetype in the script – that did not find that in the film – that women close their eyelids and look into the sun, so that an orange Wobber is created behind closed lids, a pulsation is created.

Nd.Diewoche – Our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter . We’re Doing Look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get the free subscription here.

Do women tell other stories?

I believe that everyone tells their own stories. I wouldn’t want to open these categories man and woman. We are people and I think that everyone is an individual and therefore makes a film different than someone else would do it.

What was the most difficult for you to produce this film?

The missing budget. This is a debut film that was also created in a so-called debut frame. And for this debut frame, our film project was extremely ambitious, with four time levels, two and a half hours, many children. And it was also challenging that the film just took five years and that this few money also had to survive for five years as a private person.

How was your experience to get film funding as a young director?

That was of course essential. Louise (Peter) And I received script promotion without it would not have been possible that we could have written this film so fresh from the film college. We also won the Thomas Strittmatter Prize associated with money. That also saved us. And then we were able to find great partners. But we also didn’t get important grants.

Did you always want to become a director?

Nee. (laughs) I still don’t know if I want to be. I was not the child who got a Super 8 camera in hand and always knew that she wanted to make films. It somehow happened to me.

In their twenties, they did other exciting, interesting things, including sorceress and fire dancer.

I don’t know what I wanted to be. As a little child, I wanted to do something great. I didn’t know where to go for a long time. So who invented this with these professions? Something about it still seems so absurd to me that we have all professions. I already know how it came about, but I actually find it wrong that we all get up early in the morning and then practice a job all our lives. I just wish that there should be no professions. (laughs)