After winning the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2026, awarded jointly with the directors of La bola negra, Paweł Pawlikowski brings Fatherland to the 21st Rome Film Festival. The Polish director, already an Oscar winner for Ida and awarded at Cannes in 2018 for Cold War, returns to confront the wounds of European history through an intimate narrative, in which the division of a country is reflected in the relationships among family members. The film confirms the filmmaker’s interest in characters who seek a place in the world as History continually redraws its borders.
Set in the summer of 1949, Fatherland follows the return to Germany of writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, after sixteen years of exile in the United States. Accompanying him is his daughter Erika, an actress and writer, with whom he travels by car through a country devastated by the war, from Frankfurt, under American control, to Weimar, in the Soviet-influenced zone. A journey that pits two generations, two ways of experiencing exile, and two different relationships with homeland. Portraying Thomas Mann is Hanns Zischler, while the highly sought-after German actress Sandra Hüller plays Erika. The cast also includes August Diehl, Anna Madeley, Devid Striesow and Theo Trebs.
Fatherland is a proud European co-production
Produced by a production team involving Poland, Germany, Italy and France, Fatherland is written by Paweł Pawlikowski together with Henk Handloegten, with cinematography by Łukasz Żal, who previously collaborated with the director on Ida and Cold War. Filmed in black and white and presented in a 4:3 format, the film achieves a magnificent sense of completeness in just 82 minutes. It will be released in Italian cinemas on October 16 with distribution by MUBI.
The international dimension of the project was one of the aspects highlighted by Italian producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli, who had been pursuing for several years the opportunity to work with Pawlikowski. For Gianani, working with him means “confronting oneself with a filmmaker capable of starting from a seemingly marginal prompt to reach a wholly personal cinematic construction.” What strikes him most is the director’s extraordinary ability to synthesize characters, ideas, and conflicts into a few images. Gianani also emphasized how Fatherland is a film capable of exporting the European spirit precisely thanks to the joint work of the various production partners.
Lorenzo Mieli, for his part, drew attention to the financial complexity of the operation. “We have a production consortium worthy of the film’s complexity,” he observed, explaining that the involvement of numerous producers was necessary to build a budget of around 10 million euros, while also underscoring one of Fatherland‘s great strengths: the truly European nature of a project capable of speaking to the entire continent.
For Paweł Pawlikowski, the origin of Fatherland wasn’t so much the desire to make a biographical film about Thomas Mann. Initially, the producers’ intention was to adapt for the cinema the novel The Magician by Colm Tóibín, about the life of the German writer; however the director suggested exploring instead a particular moment of his life, weaving it with other family events. “I remembered Klaus Mann’s suicide. Tóibín’s book is wonderful, but I was interested only in that slice of biography, which I mingled with other family events” , the director said. A choice that led Pawlikowski to depart from the novel’s structure to build an original story, focused on a precise moment in Thomas Mann’s life.
At the center of the narrative is Mann’s return to a Germany that had changed profoundly, traversed by Cold War tensions. “He arrives in a divided, polarized Germany, with that bourgeois and liberal culture of the nineteenth century that had formed him. He hoped, putting on a brave face, to help unite Germany and he also wanted to understand how the East’s Germany worked. It was, from his point of view, a heroic mission.” Pawlikowski explained that he deliberately narrowed the film’s scope, giving up a portrait of the Mann family as a whole. “The relationships with his brother and sister were wonderful, but I couldn’t make a film about the entire family.”
Also the choice to concentrate the journey on the father-daughter relationship responds to a precise dramaturgical need. “I replaced the wife’s character with that of the daughter, because the wife had a symbiotic relationship with Mann, while Erika offered the possibility of conflict. And then Erika drove the car: it was a good pretext to write the journey they undertake together.”
Fatherland: the impossibility of telling the present
If Fatherland is set in 1949, the questions it raises also concern the author’s relationship with the contemporary world. The 69-year-old Pawlikowski does not hide that the past represents a more fertile narrative territory for him than the present.
“The past touches me, I am old enough and I grew up in Poland. But above all, I don’t know how to talk about today, I can’t find an interesting formal key. To tell the present perhaps science fiction is needed, but I—” the director continued, speaking in his wonderful Italian, “I don’t even understand how the telephone works, which is a mystery to me. In this ideological chaos, where everything is mixed, I can’t find a logic. I only see surreal scenes, and I don’t want to make films about these situations.”
The director acknowledges in the contradictions of postwar Europe something that continues to resonate with his own experience. “I tell things I feel today, but I use the world of the past, this realm crushed by history, ideology, and utopia, because I grew up in that world.” It is also a statement about his way of understanding cinema, distant from a purely industrial or commercial conception, and for this reason he says he cannot make commercial films. “A film must be a personal adventure. My work is a search inside a world, seeking material that resonates with me.”
Yet, his historical cinema does not simply seek to establish parallels with current events, since Fatherland does not mirror the fractures of today. It is a more sentimental fracture, like Mann’s, which tries to rise above a reality that is, in fact, very complicated. From here a reflection on the role of art itself, which according to Pawlikowski should show the human dimension of reality, as opposed to politics, which tends to reduce everything to a simple narrative.
Pawlikowski: “My homeland today is Europe, but it seems to be disappearing”
The title Fatherland, homeland, takes on a particularly personal meaning for a director who has traversed countries, languages and cultures.
“I left the East, Poland, when the Wall was still there. In the West you could travel anywhere. My tragedy was leaving the country that had formed me”, an experience that allows him to identify with Thomas Mann’s situation, while also understanding the reasons of the other characters. “I can sympathize with Thomas Mann, but I also understand the others. Many people could identify with, for example, Klaus’s monologue. Erika is also divided, between two kinds of love. It’s a situation that feels close to me.”
The idea of homeland, for Pawlikowski, does not necessarily coincide with a state or a geographical place. “Homeland today, for me, is Europe, which seems to be disappearing a little.” The director currently lives in Poland, on the same street where he grew up, but he also recognizes another form of belonging in his filmmaking. “By making films in a certain way, for two or three years I create a homeland together with some people.”
It is a definition that seems to reflect in the production nature of Fatherland as well, a film built through collaboration among several European countries and devoted precisely to the difficult relationship between individual identity and collective belonging.
The director also clarified that he has never nurtured a particular veneration for Thomas Mann. “Mann was an important writer for me, but not that important. He is not one of those whom I would hang a portrait of in my room. Now I like him more, because I can see the different layers of the artist’s psychology. When you’re young it can be more tedious, but as an adult you understand it better.” Among the authors whose portraits he would hang in his room he named Anton Chekhov and Arthur Rimbaud.
During the event, Pawlikowski also revealed an unexpected link with Italy, recounting that he speaks our language thanks to a period spent in Turin. “I lived in Turin for a year, between 1984 and 1985. My landlord had a stadium subscription, but he never went. So I went in his place to watch Juventus.” A lighter moment within a conversation dominated by reflections on Europe, memory and creative freedom.
Below is the trailer for Fatherland, from October 16 in cinemas distributed by MUBI.
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