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) brought him the Best Director prize at Cannes. Fatherland returned him to the Croisette in 2026, premiering in the main competition of the 79th festival and winning him a second Cannes Best Director award. A Poland–Germany–France–Italy production, it was released internationally by Mubi.

Set in 1949, the film follows the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika — actress, essayist and one-time rally driver — as they 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 that defined Ida and Cold War. At a taut 82 minutes, it distils a continent's reckoning into a single journey.

Critics greeted it as a return to his finest form, and the Best Director prize confirmed Pawlikowski's standing among the masters of European art cinema. Threading identity, family, love and guilt through the rubble of post-war Europe, Fatherland sits naturally alongside Ida and Cold War as another exquisitely controlled meditation on history's weight on private lives.