(IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN)

Spanning roughly a century, from WW1 to contemporary times, Mascha Schilinski’s extraordinary, novelistic film delineates the effects of intergenerational trauma on four girls – Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka – who each spend their youth in the same farmhouse in the German countryside. Visual motifs reappear throughout the shuffled chronology, as key images take on the quality of dreams and premonitions; the cumulative emotional power of the film builds as the disparate pieces are woven together to form a satisfying and deeply moving whole.

Notes by David O’Mahony