Biography

[press conference for Sound of Falling (2025) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival] I'm very much interested in childhood. Children quickly sense things that people don't put into words and they can feel a lot of things and discover things as well. They see the world without any bias, without preconceived ideas. They're also capable of looking beyond concepts and putting things into question.

[Cannes press conference for Sound of Falling (2025)] Louise [Louise Peter] and I were working together in the Altmark region on separate scripts and one evening we got together and we were having a glass of wine to relax. We were in the region and we had the impression that time had stopped in this region, that nothing has changed for fifty years. No one has changed. Nothing has changed the farm. We saw where the farmer had stuck his fork into the ground before dying. Everything seemed to be intact. And we happened upon a photo of three women from the 1920s. It was surprising for the time. We had the impression it was a very modern photo and we got the impression that these three women were looking straight into our eyes - we wondered who these women were.....we felt this melancholy that they suffered from, their past. So we said to ourselves, "This has all disappeared now but let's try to dig into history." We set aside therefore the script we were working on and began our quest. Several things happened in this place, something we discovered in the course of our research - we thought maybe someone in the room who was using her mobile phone and Googling something; 50 years ago another woman perhaps lived in that room and experienced something else and likewise for a previous generation 100 years ago. That's what really inspired us. We have this idea of traumatism, which goes from one generation to the next. We don't have access to these traumas any more, but something remains in people's hearts. It's often our body that indicates that we've inherited this past trauma.

[Cannes press conference for Sound of Falling (2025)] I'd rather people feel a film before understanding it. What was really important for people to understand was that it's a very subjective story - we can place trust in the public in this respect. I've watched very complicated films, others which follow a chronology, so it's a way of discovering different things. You can use different means in films. These are films where you have to let yourself go, you have to immerse yourself in the film, identify with the characters. It's a very radical, subjective way to discover other people's worlds. It also shows you the function of memory - how does memory work? How does perception work? And for us it was very important to try to understand all this and portray it. In the end, instead of having just a narrative, a storyline, it's like a stream of memory.