Fatherland

Paweł Pawlikowski is one of European cinema's most decorated living directors: Ida (2013) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Cold War (2018) won him Best Director at Cannes. Fatherland brought him back to the Croisette in 2026, premiering in the main competition of the 79th festival and winning him a second Cannes Best Director award. It is a Polish, German, French and Italian production, released internationally by Mubi.

The year is 1949. The Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, an actress, essayist and one-time rally driver, drive a black Buick across a Germany still in ruins, from the American-occupied west to Soviet-controlled Weimar. Sandra Hüller plays Erika opposite Hanns Zischler's Thomas in what is essentially a two-hander, and Pawlikowski shoots it in the spare, luminous monochrome and elliptical compression of Ida and Cold War. It runs a taut 82 minutes and fits a continent's reckoning into a single car journey.

Critics saw it as a return to his best form, and the second Best Director prize settled Pawlikowski's place among the leading figures of European art cinema. The film weaves identity, family, love and guilt through the rubble of post-war Europe, and Fatherland belongs on the shelf beside Ida and Cold War: another tightly controlled film about the weight of history on private lives.