Insider tip from Germany: Mascha Schilinski in Cannes

"I'm very excited," the 41-year-old director and screenwriter reveals in an interview with RBB. "I'm incredibly happy, but the excitement outweighs everything else." Of course, she hoped that "Looking Into the Sun" would be shown at a major festival. After all, the film deserves it. "But I didn't really expect it. This is a filmmaker's dream!"

This dream is now coming true at the 78th Cannes International Film Festival (until May 25). Here, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung sardonically notes, German filmmakers are "sometimes harder to find than a decent lunch for under 20 euros." But this time, you'll find them, albeit not in the way you'd expect.

Well-known directors such as Fatih Akin ("Amrum") and Christian Petzold ("Miroirs No. 3") are presenting their new films on the Croisette, but only in side panels and not in the main competition. In the race for the Palme d'Or, alongside auteur film stars such as Wes Anderson and Kelly Reichardt, only one German film artist is in contention: Mascha Schilinski. The last person to achieve this feat was Maren Ade with her film "Toni Erdmann" in 2016.

A four-generation portrait

What is "Looking into the Sun" about? The film draws our attention to an old four-sided farm in asmall village in the Altmark region of eastern Germany. Four women live, or once lived, there, whose stories the film drama interweaves through leaps in time. So skillfully that the boundaries between the characters blur over the course of the plot. A four-generation portrait becomes a picture of the century.

"When we walked through the rooms of the courtyard, we felt the centuries pass," Mascha Schilinski recalls, "and a very old childhood question came to mind." Even as a little girl growing up in an old Berlin apartment, she always asked: "What has happened within these walls? Who exactly has sat in this spot where I am sitting now? What fates have transpired here? What have the people here experienced and felt?" Many ask themselves such questions, but very few make a film out of them.

The female gaze in film

In Mascha Schilinski's case, it's also important that, as in her debut film "The Daughter" (2017), a psychodrama about a complicated parental relationship, she once again focuses on a female perspective . This female perspective is very important to her and her co-writer Louise Peter, says Mascha Schilinski, because it appears far too rarely. "Looking into the Sun" therefore tells the story from a woman's perspective. "The film is largely about gazes, the gazes women have been exposed to over a century, how it feels today, and also how that carries on, burning into people's bodies."

Mascha Schilinski's path to film seems preordained: She is the daughter of a filmmaker who accompanied her to film locations and sets as a child. During her school years, she acted in television and cinema films. She then worked as a casting director, completed internships in the film industry, traveled through Europe, and worked as a magician and fire dancer for a small traveling circus. After completing her training as a writer at the Hamburg Film School , she settled in Berlin as a freelance writer for series and films.

Her debut film, "The Daughter," which screened at the 2017 Berlinale, already garnered Mascha Schilinski a lot of attention. The nomination for Cannes is likely to give her career a significant boost. When the invitation came from Cannes, she couldn't believe it. "I first had to look up whether 'Official Selection' was some kind of sidebar or really the competition," says Mascha Schilinski. "We submitted the film to all three A-list festivals: Berlin, Venice, and Cannes. We didn't even know if the respective selections would even watch the film. Nobody knew us." But shortly before Christmas, the message came, saying: "Congratulations, you're in the competition at Cannes!"