Fatherland

Fatherland (2026) won Paweł Pawlikowski the Best Director award at Cannes, and its subject is a journey: Thomas Mann's return to Germany. Summer 1949. Mann has been in exile for sixteen years, has become an American citizen, and is the most recognised German opponent of Nazism. With his daughter Erika he gets into a black Buick and drives from American controlled Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar. The country in between is rubble. The question the film asks is who a man returning to a country that stayed silent for a decade is supposed to talk to. Mann is received at every stop and nobody asks him the real question, and he asks nobody either. The Cold War has just begun and both sides want to claim him. The father and daughter relationship is the actual tension. Erika is angrier and more direct and cannot tolerate her father's measured tone. Pawlikowski shot in black and white again, as in Ida and Cold War. The frames are tight, the empty space is wide, and it runs only 82 minutes, which is characteristically short for him. Sandra Hüller plays Erika. Good for: art cinema, history, and Pawlikowski. Less good for: viewers unfamiliar with the period will miss references, the pace is calm, and the film explains nothing.