\n\tIn a wide-ranging discussion, the directors move beyond awards-season narratives to confront bigger questions: Whether filmmaking is inherently political, how trauma echoes across generations, and why cinema \u2014 especially on the big screen \u2014 still matters.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe European Cinema Roundtable \u2014 European Cinema on the Edge \u2014 is a collaboration between The Hollywood Reporter, German broadcaster DW and the European Film Academy<\/a> and was recorded on January 16 at DW\u2019s studios in Berlin.<\/p>\n \n\tWhy did you all become directors? Joachim, you started as a professional skateboarder\u2026<\/p>\n \n\tJoachim Trier<\/a>: At least I had a sponsor. I was a competitive skateboarder, yeah. I think [I became a director] because I\u2019m a third generation filmmaker. I would probably have been ashamed about saying that earlier in my career. But my grandfather was a filmmaker. That affected me tremendously. My parents were both in movies. My father is a sound designer. My mother is a director of documentaries. I kind of grew up on film sets. And I love those people.<\/p>\n \n\tI was a bit of a kind of restless young person. I didn\u2019t love school. I found my way into skateboarding. And there I started filming my friends. I made these films when I was 15-16, years old, where I would just film a whole summer and cut it together with music. It wasn\u2019t only skating, it was also the lives of people I knew, kind of recounting a summer every year. Slowly, I just realized that\u2019s what I want to do with my life.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tStellan Skarsgard<\/a> and Renate Reinsve<\/a> in Joachim Trier\u2019s Sentimental Value.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChristian Belgaux<\/p>\n \n\tAnd Mascha what was it like for you?<\/p>\n \n\tMascha Schilinski<\/a>: I was a little bit a troublemaker in school, so I left school before school could kick me out. I didn\u2019t have a diploma and I traveled some years. Then I realized I would love to study,[film] but I hadn\u2019t graduated. So I looked for something I could study without [a high school diploma]. And the only thing was film.<\/p>\n \n\tThe good thing was I knew something about film, because, like, you Joachim, my mom worked on film. I knew there were jobs there, knew about this film life. First I studied screenplay writing. I wrote for a couple of years. Then I decided I want to do my own films. So I studied directing.<\/p>\n \n\tOliver, you came from a completely different direction, right? You didn\u2019t have any sort of formal training. Why did you feel compelled to become a director?<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: I like images. They are tasty. When I see pictures of myself being a child, I never look at the camera. I\u2019m all the time playing. I\u2019m all the time making films in a way. In a way I\u2019m escaping \u2014 I was escaping reality. The images, this inner world was warm, was tasty. It\u2019s this taste of images, this flavor, that I like to imagine, I like to translate it into images. It\u2019s warm, it\u2019s just a good feeling, I don\u2019t know. I just surrender to this. I surrendered to the images and their warmth.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tOliver Laxe\u2019s Sirat<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tQuim Vives<\/p>\n \n\tJafar Panahi<\/a>: I was raised working class and for us, there was no entertainment. All we had was a library in our neighborhood. So I always was there. I was, I think, 11 or 12, and I was quite a chubby boy. Because of that, someone asked me if I want to act in a film, a super 8 film. I said, \u2018Yeah, why not?\u2019 On set for the first time was the first time I saw a camera. I realized there is some person looking from this camera into the world. I really wanted to be that person behind the camera.<\/p>\n \n\tI really had this obsession to look at the world from behind the camera. I started working in the summer and I saved my money until I could buy a photography camera that was a Zenit [Soviet model] camera. That was the starting point. I started taking photos. I started working with images. Then I studied cinema at college.<\/p>\n \n\tSo the main link between all of you is that you were all misbehaved children. Now, we\u2019re going to talk about your films in a second, but Jafar, given the brutal crackdown in Iran by the government on protesters, I have to start there. What\u2019s your reaction to what\u2019s happening in Iran right now?<\/p>\n \n\tJafar Panahi: The reality is that this repression has always been there in Iran after the revolution. Every time people [protest] something, the answer, the response, was repression. It\u2019s nothing new. The new thing this time is that we see them attacking people, shooting people with weapons. Within 48 hours [of the start of the countrywide protests], we saw mass murder. It\u2019s unbelievable what has happened. It\u2019s very difficult to understand.<\/p>\n \n\tThe more people they murder, the better you realize that the time of this regime is over. They are fighting against their own people with military weapons. I don\u2019t know what to say. I\u2019m speechless. In my last film, I had a kind of hope that this circle of violence would end at some point. That after this regime we will have some kind of peace. But with the kind of violence that we have experienced, my fear is that even after this regime, this violence will not be forgotten, and even worse will happen.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tJafar Panahi\u2019s It Was Just an Accident<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNeon<\/p>\n \n\tThis may be awkward to transition to talking about films, but do all of you consider filmmaking a political act?<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: I think that just deciding what you are going to shoot, what is interesting for you, is a political act. I think there is nothing more political than the poetic. And I think cinema is really a tool that can heal the collective [imagination]. I think it can elevate conscience. There are a lot of different kind of filmmakers. There are ones who are more ideological, others more poetical. I think the purpose is to touch the human heart. If we do this, this is the most political act that we can do. No matter the way. This is the important thing, to move you.<\/p>\n \n\tJafar Panahi: I want to say that I don\u2019t see myself as a politically-engaged filmmaker, because I have a certain definition for political films. For me [political films] are like political parties. They are about ideology that divides people into good and bad. I\u2019m more a socially-engaged filmmaker. In [socially-engaged] films, there is no absolute good or bad human being, but it\u2019s the situation that makes this person good or bad.<\/p>\n \n\tI think that everyone, and every ideology, should be respected. They all should contribute. This is what happens in my film with the torturer. In the whole film, every character is talking about this one person [their torturer], who is absent. He\u2019s in a box, in a car.<\/p>\n \n\tBut because I wanted to be fair towards him as well, I made the decision, at the end of the film to give him a shot, a 13-minute long medium shot, so that we can see him. We see the others come and go [in the shot] but the camera doesn\u2019t turn towards those other people. That\u2019s his share [of the story]. He also has the opportunity to get a defense of what happened to him, to tell his story.<\/p>\n \n\tMy films are mostly social films with a political subject or theme. Maybe I make a film about war, but it is still a social film about the war, not one about the politics.<\/p>\n \n\tTo be sure, in this world today, in countries under authoritarian regimes, even your clothes can be political. How you live, how you behave, everything can be political. But when we are talking about films, it\u2019s not about politics anymore. It\u2019s about the society. It\u2019s about the humans.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tMascha Schilinski\u2019s Sound of Falling<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFabian Gamper\/Studio Zentral<\/p>\n \n\tMascha, your film, Sound of Falling, carries through a century of German history, told from a female perspective, young women and girls growing up on this same small farm in Eastern Germany. These are untold stories of intergenerational trauma. Did you see the film as a political statement when you were making it?<\/p>\n \n\tMascha Schilinski: Initially, we weren\u2019t concerned about the political aspect at all. What we really wanted to do was to look into the deepest depths of the people who lived there and generate [something] from those depths. While we were conducting the research, we realized that there are these concealed stories. There are hidden, untold stories of women, which tend to be neglected because they\u2019re in the margins of history.<\/p>\n \n\tMany of those women could not read or write, and these are often stories that are so shot through with shame that people wouldn\u2019t even talk about them on their deathbed. Initially, we didn\u2019t intend to make a film told just from the female perspective. We started looking broadly into intergenerational trauma and the way in which trauma is passed down from generation to generation.<\/p>\n \n\tHowever, at one point, we realize that there is a striking distinction. There was a question as to how women were looked at for over a century, and that women were looked at differently than men. Over the course of time, we realized, as well, [the importance] because we were looking at this specific location where we shot, in the former GDR, what used to be East Germany. The film became more and more political as we were making it. But that wasn\u2019t our initial intention.<\/p>\n \n\tJoachim, although your and Masha\u2019s films are very different, I think there are connections. Sentimental Value is the story of a film director, played by Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd, trying to reconnect to his estranged daughters and he only seems to be able to do so through the medium of film. As you mentioned, your dad and grandfather were in the film business. Are they autobiographical components to your movie?<\/p>\n \n\tJoachim Trier: I think the film is about autobiography. It\u2019s about how people express themselves in indirect ways through the medium they choose. Norway has been a country of peace since the Second World War and the five-year occupation by the Nazis. My grandfather was in work camp during the war because he was a very brave man, and he was in the resistance. It\u2019s kind of magical that he survived.<\/p>\n \n\tHe started doing music as a jazz musician, and then became a film director. I\u2019ve always thought he did it in order to survive. He tried to find a way to express himself in my life. [After the war] he became a pacifist and quite political.<\/p>\n \n\tNow I have got two children, and the world is a very complicated place. Writing this film with [co-screenwriter] Eskil Vogt, I was asking myself these questions. Even though we\u2019re making a story about a family at peace, they\u2019re trying to reconcile with history. They\u2019re trying to forgive a difficult father that has been very affected by being the first generation after the war and by having a mother who has been traumatized by the Second World War.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tJoachim Trier photographed at the Dorint Hotel in Berlin on January 16, 2026.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKuba Dabrowski<\/p>\n \n\tI ask myself: How many generations does it take after a war or after a war trauma, before it stops affecting people? That\u2019s the question I ask when I look at my kids: Will I be the wall that changes things, or will those events that are so far in the past seemingly still be alive in them?<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s a really strange dichotomy. [to Schilinski]: I also love that in your film, [there is] the ambivalence of memory. We owe it to the past to remember and to tell those stories, yet we also owe a new generation a sense of openness to the possibilities of a future that\u2019s not affected and tainted [by the past]. That ambivalence becomes then the individual\u2019s relation to history. In a strange way, I see a lot of films this year that deal with that.<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: I think that we are, all of us, broken because of different factors. We are broken, but in a way, we hide this wound. I think that the ravers [in Sir\u00e2t], they are broken but they show it. I think that\u2019s really healthy \u2014 in order to stop the pain, to stop this suffering.<\/p>\n \n\tThe suffering is provoked from people who are suffering. We suffer so we provoke suffering. To stop this, it\u2019s really important to connect with the wound, to celebrate the wound, to dance the wound, to connect with our shadows. It\u2019s something [I felt] since the beginning, when I met this community [of underground ravers]. Then I was more idealistic, I identified with an idealistic image of myself, and the process of being with them and raving became more about looking inside. About dancing this wound in order to stop the pain.<\/p>\n \n\tThe \u2018dancing the wound\u2019 you talk about takes place against a powerful soundtrack from electronic artist Kangding Ray. Why did you think this kind of music, this dark techno, would be the perfect mirror of your film\u2019s themes?<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: It\u2019s curious. You say dark techno. It\u2019s called deep techno.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m not an expert!<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: No, it\u2019s fine. Because [the idea of deep techno] is that through shadows you arrive to the light. That was the idea with Sir\u00e2t, to take this tunnel, to look inside. Sometimes it\u2019s painful. But the idea was at some point, to arrive at a kind of transcendence. I hope that people could feel light at the end of this demanding film.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tOliver Laxe photographed at the Dorint Hotel in Berlin on January 16, 2026<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKuba Dabrowski<\/p>\n \n\tMascha Schilinski: I find so interesting what you said right now, Oliver, because when my co-author Louisa [Peter] and me started the writing process on Sound of Falling, we were so curious about the fact that our bodies are more transparent than we are. There\u2019s a line in the film where Angelica, this girl in the 80s, says: \u2018It\u2019s so funny that our head blushes when we are full of shame and trying to hide it.\u2019 Our body is so much more transparent than we [are].<\/p>\n \n\tDuring research for the film, we found many hidden writings, small half sentences in between descriptions of idyllic childhoods, written in this almost profound tone. In between, there\u2019d be a sentence, like: \u201cWomen have to be made so they aren\u2019t dangerous for men.\u201d Or a maid who says: \u2018I\u2019ve lived for nothing.\u201d We could feel these many small, hidden things. And we were interested in these moments. Because when you think of trauma, you often think about war and things like this. But I think there are also little, tiny moments that can happen during a life that are so impactful. There\u2019s a character in the film, living in the present, and she receives a gaze, and this gaze, this look will form her complete life after this.<\/p>\n \n\tWe wanted to create a stream of images so that you have the feeling that everyone who lived at this farm is thinking or dreaming at the same time. It\u2019s about memory itself. How unreliable memory is, and how abrupt, fragmented and also associative. This became the structure for the whole film.<\/p>\n \n\tDo you see filmmaking partially as personal therapy?<\/p>\n \n\tJoachim Trier: I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t make films with a clear plan on why I\u2019m doing it. I just don\u2019t know how to do anything else. I don\u2019t know how you guys feel, but it\u2019s also a passion for the form. I love movies. I grew up in movie theaters. I think movies all the time. I am sitting in situations and I\u2019m looking at people, all this interesting behavioral stuff, psychological stuff, the mysteries of the others. I find that engaging and interesting. Then to make characters that are not me or my co-writer or my actors, but something in between us.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s just far enough removed from myself so that I don\u2019t have to be ashamed of what they\u2019re doing or protect them or anything. I can be three dimensional. I can look at them and study them and collaborate around these characters. And I think that\u2019s the kick: To find images that show some sort of human experience.<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing, you know? I just give myself to my intuition. Now with my future project, I\u2019m already feeling something in the body, as you say, Masha, my body knows things that my head doesn\u2019t yet.<\/p>\n \n\tJafar Panahi: I think when the filmmaker has pain, something moves, and this is the kick the filmmaker needs to tell something, to show something and show it to others. This pain could be very simple, a very simple conversation, that kicks something in you. It won\u2019t be an idea right now, but you will keep it in your mind unconsciously and you can\u2019t get rid of it.<\/p>\n \n\tIt happened when I was in prison. In prison in Iran, they ask you questions. If you are a political prisoner, it takes 7-8 hours. You sit close to the wall, you have a pen and a paper and someone behind you asks you questions. You have a blindfold, and you have to push it up a little bit so you can write your answers.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen I was doing that, I wasn\u2019t thinking about the questions or my answers. I only thought: \u2018Who is this person behind me?\u2019 I couldn\u2019t see anything, but I could hear him. I started asking myself: \u2018How old is he? What is he wearing? If I see him outside, would I recognize him? If I do, how would I behave?\u2019<\/p>\n \n\tAt that moment, I didn\u2019t know that at some point I would want to make a film about this person. I was there. I saw everything. I sensed everything, and I memorized the situation. It was that which came out as a film later.<\/p>\n \n\tWhatever you do in your life, I think it will be in your films at some point. You don\u2019t know how. You can\u2019t decide how. We can\u2019t help finding subjects in our life. We see, we observe, and we want to tell.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tMascha Schilinski photographed at the Dorint Hotel in Berlin on January 16, 2026.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKuba Dabrowski<\/p>\n \n\tMascha Schilinski: I think there are so different starting points for a film. Sometimes it\u2019s an image. Sometimes it\u2019s something that you heard, or sometimes it\u2019s it\u2019s a strong feeling inside of you where you have to find a way, a language for it. In Sound of Falling I was so interested in this invisible thing, these things you have no name for, things you can\u2019t tell about. And trying to find a form to show them, to turn them into a film. I think questions are a good starting point. Not having the answers already but seeing what happens during the process of writing.<\/p>\n \n\tAll of your films are official Oscar submissions. What\u2019s the experience been like, going through the crazy circus of awards season?<\/p>\n \n\tJoachim Trier: Part of being a filmmaker is what I call paying promo tax. It\u2019s a privilege. It means that you are being seen and people care. I don\u2019t take it lightly. I come from Norway, a tiny country, the suburbs of Europe. We\u2019re very grateful when anything we make travels.<\/p>\n \n\tBut [touring with your film] you also find a kind of a secondary story to the film you\u2019ve made. You don\u2019t know it when you made the film, because you\u2019ve been in this tumble dryer of intuitive creativity. I hadn\u2019t negotiated what my film was until I showed it in Cannes<\/a> and got the applause. Then you\u2019re standing there, very vulnerable and nervous. Then people start writing about it. People are talking to you about it. And slowly you start understanding how you communicate about your film.<\/p>\n \n\tI feel by now, we\u2019ve probably all kind of peaked a bit. We\u2019ve told our story now. So now we have the choice of either starting to invent some bullshit secondary story, to find more entertaining stuff to say, or we find new ways of telling the story.<\/p>\n \n\tBut once in a while, you meet people still that connect you to the core of what the film came from. Someone will share a personal anecdote about something relating to your film, and that also brings you back. It\u2019s so creatively stimulating, even though it takes a lot of travel and a lot of talk.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Norway we\u2019re a little bit shyer sometimes than other cultures, and you feel this kind of shame about the attention you\u2019re getting. But it has a flip side, that we can be part of a bigger presentation of a group of films. [To the group] I\u2019ve met all of you before. We\u2019ve kind of been on the road together, and I\u2019m seeing you all doing well. We know about the award aspect of it, but at the end of the day, we\u2019re privileged to be in a group of films that people are seeing and discussing.<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Laxe: I think it\u2019s a luxury. It\u2019s a privilege to share your films at this level, worldwide. In Japan it\u2019s not the same thing as in Mexico. You\u2019re having new interpretations, people are having different experiences with your films. You understand how a film transcends us, that whole art has to transcend the author, and the level of meanings are infinite sometimes. That\u2019s powerful. I really come from the underground. This is my fourth film but it\u2019s the first time I can share a film at this level. So I\u2019m really grateful.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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