“Fatherland,” a Cannes competition title from Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, portrays German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter during a 1949 tour of post-war Germany. Several outlets describe the film as a tightly controlled, black-and-white road movie that mixes public political tensions with private grief. Thomas Mann, portrayed by Hanns Zischler, is shown returning to the country he fled from Nazi persecution, including a stop in Frankfurt to receive an award named after Goethe. Sandra Hüller plays Erika Mann, Mann’s daughter, who accompanies him and becomes central to the film’s emotional narrative. Reviews characterize the journey as tense and reflective, with conversations and encounters that underscore moral choices and the difficulties of reconciliation within a family shaped by exile and betrayal. While critics differ slightly in emphasis—some point to the film’s historical scrutiny and authenticity, others highlight its broader relevance or spiritual questions—all frame “Fatherland” as an exquisitely staged, matter-of-fact drama rooted in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War’s looming pressures.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” depicts Thomas Mann’s 1949 return with Sandra Hüller
“Fatherland,” a Cannes competition title from Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, portrays German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter during a 1949 tour of post-war Germany. Several outlets des...
- Paweł Pawlikowski directs “Fatherland,” which premieres at Cannes as a competition film.
- The film is set in 1949 and follows Thomas Mann’s return trip through Germany.
- Hanns Zischler plays Thomas Mann; Sandra Hüller plays his daughter Erika Mann.
- The story includes Mann’s Frankfurt stop to receive a Goethe-named award.
- Reviews describe the film as black-and-white, tightly staged, and focused on moral and personal conflict in the post-war period.
The Polish filmmaker, working in German with exquisite actors Sandra Hüller and August Diehl, tells IndieWire about finding resonant conflicts in his moving post-war Cannes hit that completes his black-and-white period trilogy.
3 months agoThe matter-of-fact seduction of Pawlikowski’s filmmaking lies in how he stages everything with a coolly objective authenticity. In "Fatherland," he lends this historical moment a time-machine quality, so that we feel we’re right there, in Germany in 1949, seeing the sands of history shift. Pawlikowski is ruminating on moral choice, and he’s also ruminating on God.
3 months agoCannes film festival: Hanns Zischler stars as Thomas Mann on his 1949 tour of Germany, contending with political barbs, personal tragedy and his daughter, played by an extraordinary HüllerHere is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain. It is directed and co-written by the Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski and shot in lustrous monochrome by Lukasz Zal; it is a film about exile and betrayal, the impossibility of going home and of reconciling an artist’s children to their secondary importance.The setting is 1949 and the celebrated German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann – who fled the Nazis before the war for California exile and US citizenship – has returned home, first visiting Frankfurt (now in West Germany) to receive an award named after Goethe, whose birthplace this is. It is Goethe’s enlightened civilised wisdom and apolitical artistry Mann will pointedly evoke in his many elaborate speeches. Continue reading...
3 months agoHanns Zischler costars as the Nobel prize-winning German writer in this latest Cannes competitor from the director of 'Ida' and 'Cold War.'
3 months agoCannes: The mighty Sandra Hüller stars as German author Thomas Mann's daughter, tasked with taking him on an emotional postwar trip in 1949, in the Polish filmmaker's chiseled-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life road movie.
3 months agoPremiering at Cannes and starring Sandra Hüller, Pawel Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" is set during the Cold War — a complex period for the prominent anti-Nazi intellectuals.
3 months ago
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