If These Walls Could Talk

In Mascha Schilinski’s mesmerising Sound of Falling, fragments from a hundred years in one farmhouse coalesce into a cinematic flood of memory.

The film traces moments in the lives of four adolescent girls across the last century – their desires and distress, their secrets and truths. Though separated by time, far-reaching resonances emerge as echoes of experiences linger.

This short season of films explores how homes embody memories and places hold presences from the past – from the gothic and ghostly, in Guillermo Del Toro’s newly restored feature The Devil’s Backbone and Jack Clayton’s classic horror The Innocents, to the poetic sensibility of Terence Davies’ debut Distant Voices, Still Lives, taking in several decades of family life and strife.

“What is a ghost?

A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again?
A moment of pain, perhaps.
Something dead which still seems to be alive.
An emotion suspended in time.
Like a blurred photograph.

Like an insect trapped in amber.”

⁃ The Devil’s Backbone

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