In die Sonne schauen

In die Sonne schauen is one of the most powerful German films in years. Mascha Schilinski weaves together four decades of women's lives in a nonlinear, dreamlike mosaic where memories, bodies, and experiences merge into something that transcends generations. With breathtaking visuals and extraordinary performances, the film is dark, poetic, and deeply moving. It lingers long after the credits roll.

I saw the movie in Cannes. Very unusual and interesting images. Meditative. I fell asleep twice. So it's really good for relaxing.

I missed the last hour though. I left. It was juat. So endlessly repetitive.

I didn't understand what it was all about. But maybe it's more of a movie for women. By women for women. The men are crippled or dead or sex monsters or lying there sick. Pigs grunt. The men grunt like pigs. Most have mustaches.

The women are all suffering somehow but you don't really understand why. Nobody laughs except the kids. A colorless world. Very enigmatic. Like a modern painting but unfortunately without impact.

There is hardly any conflict either. To say something, to have a point of view: how old-fashioned. Nothing more than a few catalog slogans.

It was edited very cryptically, so that it passes for art. I had no idea which era was being shown and who was who and from whom. Really, I had no clue. I think it would be great for a 30-minute video installation.

But as a 2.5 hour movie? Hard to bear.

Bertold Brecht said: a picture of the Krupp steel plant says nothing about the Krupp steel plant.

This pretentious piece of vanity is an overload of pictures and sounds, but it's hollow inside. It transports nothing than its own nothingness camouflaged as importance - with an exclamation mark. I am important! I am art !

But it isn't. Art isn't about barfing out all that comes to your mind. Or filming all that happens. It's about choosing, about selecting, about extracting. Extracting truth. About experiencing something, and then expressing it in the form of art you chose. I don't have the feeling that in this movie anything was felt and expressed by the authors and makers. They more like scientists, inspect, watch and depict animals in a laboratory. Staying neutral and detached.

There is no truth in this, as noise has no truth. You can't even make up your own truth, as your head is full of noise, no space or time for fantasising something up.

You leave the cinema with a headache and a desire to barf it all out again.

Three months later, I can remember maybe one or two scenes of the movie, and not a single emotion. The rest has anhiliated itself.

So this is the german movie for the Oscars 2026. I hope the Academy is not dazzled by the award this production received at the Cannes Film Festival. It contains only trace elements of a plot, has a runtime of two and a half hours which is far too long, and bores its audience to unbearable levels. After 20 minutes, I looked at the clock for the first time and thought: Oh dear, and I have to endure this for more than two hours. Several people in our cinema left early. They had had enough of the missing dialogues and the constantly similar monologues. The protagonists share something morbid, a kind of death wish. Unfortunately, this totally overrated, not recommendable film is only boring to death.

Critics in Germany were almost hysterically announcing this film as THE new exceptional Movie Event. That should have made me more suspicious before its official start. But my expectations were high, probably much too high. I simply can't agree on the enthusiastic hype which follows this movie.

I found it irritatingly overlong, too repetitive and what annoyed me the most, it's aestheticism stands too dominant in the forground and suffocates any believable content, storyline or relation between the actresses and their characters. Instead Schilinski confronts our patience with an endless atmospheric associative stream of consciousness through four generations of women, and nothing more to tell than 100 years of their suffering. Pain, grief, sorrow, suicide, abuse.

And by the way: 100 years of german history and not a single Nazi in sight. I just wonder.

Seriously? For my taste a ridiculous overload of wokeness, which causes the contrary effect to the intended sensitivity.

Not that I wouldn't respect her efforts, but for said reasons her characters left me extremely cold, i felt excluded and even bored most of the time. A major disappointment.