Cannes 2025 features seven films by female directors in the main competition, equalling the record set in 2023.
The line-up includes Sound Of Falling, a German film by Mascha Schilinski; Alpha, a much-expected new film by Julia Ducorneau, the 2022 Palme d'Or winner; Die My Love by Lynn Ramsay, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson; The Mastermind, a heist film by Kelly Reichardt; La Petite Derniere, by the French director Hafsia Herzi; Romeria, by Carla Simon; and Renior, a coming-of-age story by Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa.
The last woman to win the Palme d'Or was Justine Triet, the French director of Anatomy Of A Fall, in 2024. That hit film would go on to become a box-office sensation in many territories and win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Last year, Cannes also premiered Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, the take-no-prisoners body horror that lit up the otherwise tedious festival by its midpoint.
The first film by a woman filmmaker to screen this week is Sound Of Falling, a conceptually ambitious film by Mascha Schilinski. There's much to admire in the film that involves four generations of a family who live on the same farmstead in rural Germany, their lives intercutting between different timeframes, and with the same set of actors across the four threads. Schilinski's film has become the first buzzy title of the festival after the premiere, with her aesthetic choice evoking Terrence Malick (gliding shots and voice-over natation) and her poise as a storyteller apparent.
Sound Of Falling.
Spanning the early 1900s to roughly the 1980s, the women in the story -- all related, though it takes some time to figure that out -- compose a portrait of historical prejudice and structural abusiveness endured by the female sex over the century. There's a housemaid who's forced to be sterilised in order to "become safe for men"; a young woman shamed by the force of her own desire; a pre-teen girl in the 1980s whose morbid tendency becomes a cause for alarm.
Altogether, Schilinski is looking at the fate of women and their strength to defy norms and traditions, while also commenting at a larger happening in the background, like the imminence of war.
While the formal ambition of the film is admirable, these characters appear too briefly, too fleetingly, to build any real emotional connections. Lyrical cinematography and poetic drift are meant to be moving, and yet they also come across as lightweight and ethereal. Schilinski's touch is sensitive and confident, and her actors understand exactly what they're delivering, but the frequent intercuts between timelines and threads give a jarring effect that undermines the overall impact of the film.
Sound Of Falling, however, has emerged as a contender in a Cannes edition that presents a strong mixture of style and story. With the female voice ready to take charge, we can expect more exciting things to come in the remaining days.
