IN DIE SONNE SCHAUEN – Why This Film Is Becoming the Benchmark for Collaborative Cinema 2026

Fabian Gamper's camera, nominated for the Lola, is the instrument through which Schilinski's vision becomes visible. Gamper works with a palette that shifts between eras without losing visual coherence: the images of the 1910s recall daguerreotypes, grainy and flickering, as if memory itself were decaying. The 1940s carry the cool sharpness of black-and-white photography. The 1980s bring the muted colours of Super-8, the light of a DDR childhood. And the present is shot in digital clarity that paradoxically feels least tangible.

Gamper and Schilinski drew on the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman for their visual concept: an artist of the dissolving body, merging with space. The camera in In die Sonne schauen holds faces without fixing them. It drifts through rooms as if it were itself a ghost haunting the farm.

In one of the most striking passages, it follows Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) through the house, and suddenly it is no longer Angelika moving through the corridor but Erika (Lea Drinda), decades earlier, in the same hallway, with the same fear. The cut happens so imperceptibly that it only registers on a second viewing.

Evelyn Rack's editing, also nominated, is the film's invisible engine. Rack does not work with classical cutting patterns but with an associative montage technique: images follow each other not through causal logic but through emotional resonance. A falling apple in autumn 1912 becomes a falling body in 1986. The sound of a slamming door connects decades. Rack developed the film together with Billie Mind, the sound designer.

The sound design, credited to Claudio Demel, Billie Mind, Kai Tebbel, Sebastian Heyser, and Jürgen Schulz, deserves its own paragraph. In die Sonne schauen sounds unlike any German film of recent years. The farm has an acoustic life of its own: the creaking of beams, the buzzing of flies, the rumble of a sound layer that never fully settles.

The wind sounds different in the Kaiserreich than in the DDR: not because the wind has changed, but because the ears that hear it are different. Billie Mind developed a concept that treats sound as a memory trace: sounds bleed across time levels, a child's cry from the 1940s echoing into the 2020s. It is an acoustic equivalent of what the film does visually, and it works because it is never explained, only felt.

Cosima Vellenzer's production design and Maike Kiefer's set decoration faced the task of accommodating four epochs within a single location, without erasing the traces of each era but allowing them to show through. The farm in In die Sonne schauen is not a set rebuilt between time levels. It is a palimpsest: the Kaiserzeit wallpaper still visible beneath the DDR paint, the DDR paint beneath the present-day renovation. Vellenzer and Kiefer make this visible without exhibiting it. It is work that precisely understands what the film is about: the past does not disappear, it sediments.

Sabrina Krämer's costume design follows the same logic. The clothing of each character speaks not just to her era but to her social position within it: Alma wears the rigid severity of a manor daughter who does not yet know her world is ending. Erika the thinned fabrics of the war years. Angelika's clothes carry the bleak functionality of DDR provincial life. Nelly's outfits appear free, and are not.

Anne-Marie Walther and Irina Schwarz's make-up and hair follow the same approach: authenticity through restraint. Every character is dressed in her era, and imprisoned by it.

Two supporting actresses are nominated: Claudia Geisler-Bading and Lena Urzendowsky, both for In die Sonne schauen. That the film receives two nominations in the supporting category but none in the lead categories says something about its structure: there is no main character. There are four equal perspectives.

Urzendowsky, who carries the DDR passages as Angelika, plays with a mixture of longing and self-destruction that recalls the finest work of the East German film tradition. Geisler-Bading brings a heaviness to her role that never becomes illustrative: one feels the weight of the years without the film explaining it.

The younger cast members, Hanna Heckt as Alma, Lea Drinda as Erika, Laeni Geiseler as Nelly, were found through a year-long casting process. Schilinski sought faces that could embody their respective era. Working with newcomers is a risk that pays off: there is no actress in this film burdened by an audience's prior associations. One sees Alma, not the actress playing her.

On 29 May at the Palais am Funkturm, In die Sonne schauen enters the race for the Lola as the clear favourite with eleven nominations. The Akademie has shown in the past that it tends to concentrate its awards on a single film when that film is formally compelling enough: Toni Erdmann in 2017, Im Westen nichts Neues in 2023, Das Lehrerzimmer in 2023. In die Sonne schauen has the profile for it.

But the real achievement lies elsewhere. In die Sonne schauen has shown that German cinema can compete internationally without adapting. No English-language compromise, no genre cinema, no stars. Instead: Low German dialect, a farm in the Altmark, four girls whose stories touch without ever meeting. A film that trusts its audience to feel before they understand.

The farm in Neulingen is still standing. The walls are still breathing. And somewhere between the epochs that Schilinski has folded into each other lies a story that does not stop, because memory never stops. You can look into the sun. You will be blinded. But the afterimage remains.