'Sound of Falling': Cannes competition warms up with a captivating poem about ghosts and women

Several types of ghosts hovered over the first day of the Cannes Film Festival . Some haunt family homes that have stood for generations, where only a movie camera can find them. The film chosen to open the Cannes competition is titled "Sound of Falling ," directed by German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, and is a captivating and beautiful poem about the ghosts of women who inhabited the same farmhouse throughout the 20th century.

In square format and with a powerful analog texture interspersed with nineteenth-century photographs, Schilinski's film travels from the first decade of the last century through four generations of women marked by intimate and historical labyrinths. Without saying a single word on the subject, the horrors of both the Great War and the Second World War throb in everything that occurs on the closed circuit of that farm where children play with death. Like a rural gothic tale with echoes of folk horror , Sound of Falling unfolds through the eyes of girls and adolescents (and their ghosts) who show us the world around them from disturbing and mysterious places.

Schilinski's film is full of twists and turns that make it easy to get lost as the camera travels through time, traversing the bodies and souls of these women. Watching it, it's impossible not to think of Roland Barthes ' reflections on photography and death in his famous essay "Camera Lucida ": the spectral reading we, the living, make of the images of our dead, that way of projecting our own demise onto the memory of our ancestors. This is what The Sound of Falling speaks to as we get to know these enigmatic women and the world that surrounds them.

Another ghost that crossed La Croisette was that of Robert De Niro's father, evoked by his son in a public conversation in which images were projected from the documentary that the artist JR is preparing about De Niro and the painter of the same name, eclipsed by the fame of his son. The actor recalled, in his own sparing but moving way, how he never touched even the ashtrays in his father's studio because he kept everything intact for years, hoping that one day he would be able to relive the life of the man who had so marked his own.

And if the ghosts of De Niro and The Sound of Falling belong to the family, those evoked by Sergei Loznitsa 's bleak Two Prosecutors , the harsh fiction film that completed the official competition section, hark back to Stalinism. Its protagonist is a young lawyer with angelic eyes who has the courage to try to help an imprisoned, elderly member of the Communist Party. Loznitsa creates a sober, austere, and deeply claustrophobic film. A punch that revives the shadows and specters of those thousands of men buried alive.