The critical gaze of Vittorio De Agrò from the Palais

(by Cannes Luigi Noira and Vittorio De Agrò (RS) with the kind collaboration of Eleonora Ono – the photos are published courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival)

#Cannes78 comes alive with two films in the competition and a pearl in the inaugural film of UCR

COMPETITION

SOUND OF FALLING di Mascha Schilinski

Plot: Set in a remote Alfark farm, rural region west of Berlin, Sound of Falling tells the stories of four young women - Alma, Angelika, Leinka and Lia - lived in different eras, but united by an invisible bond made of memories, trauma and desires removed.

Over the course of a century, The house becomes silent theater of mysterious events, pains handed down and painful family choices. Temporal linearity is flawed, while past and present they are confused in an eternal cycle. In this scenario suspended between dream and reality, The film returns a delicate and fragmented portrait of the female, between belonging and alienation.

Review: Sound of Falling officially opened the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival 2025, initially arousing my curiosity thanks to a suggestive synopsis and a fascinating visual frame.

The first half hour promises well, evoking dreamlike atmospheres that vaguely remember The Others, however transposed in a bucolic key. however, The illusion does not last long. The film is rapidly lost in a narrative labyrinth made of fragmentary subplots, difficult to follow and even more to decipher.

The slow pace, almost static, requires considerable effort to get involved. The structure in Matrioska, in which the connections between the protagonists must be reconstructed almost exclusively through black and white photographs, It is interesting on paper but not very effective on the narrative level.

The farm, Symbolic and physical center of the film, It is the place where generations of pains and memories are condensed: A microcosm that reflects fragility, family desires and conflicts. The film wants to be a fresco on the role of women, on collective memory and emotional inheritance, but often it slips into an too self -referential style exercise.

Despite a well -kept photograph and a direction that shows sensitivity, Sound of Falling appears more as a festival film that a work capable of involving a wider audience. The excessive duration (2 hours and 40 minutes) it does not help: further weighs down a narration already complex and not very accessible.

In summary, Sound of Falling is an ambitious visual and thematic experiment, but not very successful from the point of view of narrative balance. Leaving the room, The real "sound of the fall" is perhaps that of whom, as part of the public, He woke up only with the credits.

TWO PROSECUTORS At Sergei Loznitsa, Taken from the novel of the same name by Georgy Demidov.

Plot:Soviet Union, 1937. A young prosecutor comes across a letter written by a political prisoner. Convinced that that man is the victim of the corruption of the NKVD, He decides to ask the Prosecutor General justice. Thus begins a slow and dangerous descent into the dark gears of the Soviet system.

Review: "Usually the substance counts more than form."

A principle valid in life, and often also in cinema.

But Two prosecutors is a powerful and necessary exception: Here is the form itself that is substance. It is through slowness, rigidity, The apparent immobility of the shots that Sergei Loznitsa manages to tell the horror of the Stalinist regime.

Every stylistic choice - the silences, Long static fields, The time that does not flow - becomes an integral part of the story. There is no formal complacency: the direction is severe, dry, documentary. As in his non -fictional works, Loznitsa forces us to stay there, look at, without discounts.

The film is based on a story by Georgy Demidov, dissident writer and physicist, survivor to 14 years of gulag. His personal experience makes the narrative material even more cruel, concrete, vero.

The beginning of the film is powerful and disturbing: Men and women in chains, crushed by forced work, tortured, pushed towards cancellation. The letters of complaint written by the prisoners are burned, Eliminate without leaving a trace. But one - written with blood - survives. And ends, mysteriously, on the wrong desk.

The young prosecutor Kornyev, idealist and honest, is commissioned to investigate. Aleksandr Kuznetsov interprets him with great rigor and measurement. Kornyev goes to prison, It exceeds pressure and humiliations, and manages to meet the prisoner of the letter: and Stepniak, A famous intellectual that he himself had listened to years earlier at the university.

Stepniak warns him: If you want to do your duty, He must know that he will end like him - prisoner, tortured, perhaps killed.

From that moment on, The film moves towards an end announced, inexorable. The viewer already knows how he will end up. But for Loznitsa the point is not "what" happens, But "how": The aim is to show all the steps, The bureaucratic progression of evil.

The horror is mechanized, legalized, transformed into a procedure. The murderers become official deeds, The executioners are officials for the duty. It is bureaucracy - and no longer ideology - that transforms the system into a nightmare.

Loznitsa strongly denounces the betrayal of the revolutionary spirit: The real "enemies of the people" are not the persecuted, But the persecutors - Stalin and its loyalists, held on a leash from the terror of ending up in the black list.

Two prosecutors is a very hard movie, distressing, ruthless. A glacial but lucid representation of the "banality of evil", different from the classic one, but equally disturbing.

Long silences, bureaucratic repetitions, grotesque rituals: Everything serves to immerse ourselves in a deformed and fatal reality.

sure, The film is long - over two hours - and the rhythm is almost absent. Loznitsa could have cut at least 30 minutes without losing strength or consistency. As it is, is tiring, at times exhausting. But perhaps this effort is also part of the desired experience: make us live the weight, claustrophobia, resignation.

Like it or not, Two prosecutors and an opera needed, uncomfortable, that leaves its mark. A political film in the most authentic sense: not only denounces, but question.

Loznitsa shows us - with rigor, with pain - like ideology, once corrupt by fear and thirst for power, can transform justice and the bureaucracy in the instruments of fatal repression.

IN SOME PERSPECTIVE

PROMISED SKY In Eriige first (Opening Film)

Plot: Marie, Ivorian Evangelical Pastara and former journalist, He has lived in Tunisia for ten years. His home becomes a refuge for two young women: Naney, mother on the run from the past and looking for a better future, e Jolie, Student determined to redeem himself for himself and his family. The sudden arrival of Kenza, A girl who survived a shipwreck, upsets the balance of this fragile microcosm. In a tense social context, between precariousness and suspicions, The solidarity between the three women is put to the test, bringing out their strength as much as their vulnerability.

Review: Welcoming a little girl who has lost everything is not simple. Take care of it, reassure her, protect it ... requires more than one roof: It takes love, wedding ring, maternal instinct. Almeno, The will to try.

Cancer, The little girl who bursts into Marie's life, Lingia, It is not just another mouth to feed: is a catalyst. His innocence moves something into each of the three women, forcing them to look inside, to confront their choices, Fears and desires.

Marie stopped being a journalist after the tragic death of his son and embraced the faith by becoming a pastora of the “Church of the Resistance”. Its mission is to welcome, protect, refuge. But she too, behind the smile and the apparent force, hides a pain that has never really let it go.

Jolie, 24 years, Study engineering. Is brilliant, ambitious, full of life: bale, it has fun, Flirting. It all wants, right away. But the Tunisian reality soon reminds her that the border between dream and frustration is subtle, especially when you find yourself living in a country that does not belong to you.

Naney is the most complex. Determined, proud, hungry for redemption. He wants to earn enough to bring his son left to Cameroon back to him. But the shortcuts that choose them on a dangerous road. When Marie discovers her trafficking, Hunting of the house. Naney finds himself alone, betrayed by those who thought friend.

The tension between the three grows. The contrasts explode. Trauma emerge. None is more than before.

Marie, who seemed the firm, he understands he is not ready to put aside his pain, Not even for the good of Kenza. Jolie, After an unfair arrest by the Tunisian police, It clashes with the hard reality of racism and precariousness. Naney touches the bottom, But perhaps there he finds a glimmer of truth there.

Promised the sky, Opening movies of the UNO Certain Regard of Cannes section 2025, It is a powerful story of friendship, Redemption and maternity in an unstable social context. Shows that even the most fragile spaces can become places of resistance, care and rebirth.

The film tackles the question of evangelical shepherds with touch and realism, unjustly accused of promoting illegal immigration, underlining how thin the border between solidarity and suspicion is.

Aïssa Maïga, Laetitia Ky and Deborah Christelle Lobe Naney are magnetic. They stage three deeply different characters with intensity, humanity and charisma. Their alchemy, Not only actor but also emotional, makes relationships between the credible and engaging characters.

Erige Sehiri signs an essential direction, delicate, never intrusive. He manages to keep pain and hope together, faith and disillusionment, without forcing. Find the right tone, intimate and universal, To tell a world made of small wounds and great gestures of love.

Vittorio De Agrò (RS)