Pawel Pawlikowski‘s seventh feature “Fatherland” came into the Cannes Competition with high expectations, and judging from audience and critical reaction, it should win a prize or two. Sandra Hüller is a frontrunner for Best Actress, having just won that award in Berlin for “Rose.” After all, this is the Polish filmmaker behind Oscar nominee “Cold War” (2018) and Oscar winner “Ida” (2013).
And, given that “Fatherland” also parses European history through complicated characters, and is filmed in black-and-white in the Academy ratio, Pawlikowski grants that he has unintentionally fashioned a trilogy.
The movie confronts Germany’s post-World War II trauma in a family road movie centered on three characters: the Nobel Laureate novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), his daughter and assistant Erika (Hüller), and his son Klaus (August Diehl). The movie kicks off with a bravura five-and-a-half minute locked off single take of Klaus in Cannes, sitting naked on the floor by a bed with a sleeping young man. He talks on the phone with Erika, who tries to coax her depressed drug-addict intellectual twin to come on a road trip with her back to Germany as his father accepts the Goethe prize.
“When is the last time you felt anything?,” he asks.
I sat down with Pawlikowski at the J.W. Marriott in Cannes. The father-daughter relationship at the center of this heady literary movie about the “collapse of Europe,” he said, “seems to connect things.” While Italian producers initially pitched him a biography of Thomas Mann, he rejected making a biopic. But something in the book triggered the nugget of what would become “Fatherland.”
“There is this little moment, which I use as a starting point to invent a story,” he said. “When Thomas goes to Germany, he’s in an interesting situation. It rang a bell. Everything’s collapsed, everything he believed in. He’s trying to regenerate it in a one-man operation. He tries to bring together Germany and transcend the ideological division.”
Scenes of the humanist Mann speaking earnestly to auditoriums full of people who likely do not hear him are strangely resonant with today. (Pawlikowski put enormous time into finding the right faces for the extras.) “He’s like a boxer going into the ring,” said Pawlikowski. “That’s his big entry.”
Around that same time, Klaus committed suicide and his father did not attend the funeral. “Suddenly, I knew I had a critical mass for a film,” said Pawlikowski. “There was the historical context that was also psychological. And this triangular family drama.”
It’s also the first time Pawlikowski is dealing with real people, although he fictionalizes freely. He hints at Erika’s homosexuality as an American journalist flirts with her. “It’s hinted that she had a relationship with Betty, one of the journalists who crops up,” said Pawlikowski. “And Betty has certain expectations. Erika just cuts it short now, because she’s on a mission, and that affair is long in the past.” (Erika is also, fascinatingly, married to gay British poet W.H. Auden.)
Pawlikowski, who studied German literature in Germany, said that Mann was gay, “but super repressed,” he said. “He sublimated it in his work. No one thinks he never acted upon it, he was writing about it [‘Death in Venice’], but quite overtly in his diaries about his fantasies. He had crushes and loves for certain men throughout his life. That’s what so annoys Erika at some point. He turns everything into words, he turns everything into art, and he exploits his feelings, repressed passions, and fantasies creatively. He even wrote in one of his early diaries that he desired young Klaus. His diaries were in a safe in Munich in 1933 when they escaped. The big fear was that the Nazis are going to get hold of these diaries. There was a secret mission organized by Erika to rescue the diaries from the Nazis.”
In West Germany, Erika attends a fancy cocktail party, where she runs into a handsome man who turns out to be her ex-husband (Joachim Meyerhoff), a Nazi actor. He tells her she had it easy, with her languages, skills, activities, and rich father. The bile rises in Hüller until she whips out her hand and slaps him. “Everyone assumes she slaps him because he’s a Nazi, but she slaps him because he hit a nerve, because she was a nepo baby,” said Pawlikowski. “Without the father, they would have no money, no contacts, none of this lifestyle that they had. They lived on the Riviera, drove around, were super well-educated, and had fantastic connections.”
Of course Pawlikowski went to Germany’s most lauded actress to play Erika. In the slap scene, “You watch the transformation of her face, and it really, really happens,” said Pawlikowski. “She doesn’t seem to be acting. She has this fake smile, and then in her eyes, what happens there? There was one take where things come to the surface, brilliantly, in a way that’s not scripted and not acted, it mysteriously unfolds.” (Given the recent Academy Award rule changes, Hüller could land two Best Actress slots and a third for Supporting for “Project Hail Mary.” And still to come is “Digger.”)
For the single take prologue, Pawlikowski kept sculpting it with Diehl, taking things out, putting them back in, to reach the right length and cadence. “August was good at that jazzy approach, playing back and forth with you,” he said. “He was totally open into for that kind of musical approach to performance. The whole thing had an integrity to it.”
Klaus pops up in the movie a few time like a hovering ghost. “That was a tricky decision,” said Pawlikowski, “I’ve never done that in my life. But this kind of astral projection, if somebody dies, it has been recorded, and [Erika] is so missing and craving him.”
One of Erika Mann’s many skills was driving, which she does in the movie, ferrying Mann around in a giant glossy Buick. “She did long distance rallies,” said Pawlikowski. “And drove often with Klaus. They drove to Kazakhstan, across the Steppes. She wrote with Klaus about driving around the Riviera, and she was behind the wheel. [The Buick] was a difficult car to drive, so Sandra had to really practice a lot, and she’s a really good driver herself. But this car is really heavy, and the gears are tricky, so it took a bit of prep.”
As for the look of the film, cinematographer Łukasz Żal returns, bringing far more camera movement than before. “Everything results from the material, it’s not like I’m imposing this style,” said Pawlikowski. “I like the photography to be strong and concentrated, so that’s the basic kind of principle, but then you do whatever is right. It’s a road movie, but the camera moves when it has to move, but it doesn’t move just to have a bit of cinematic gesture. It’s super primitive and simple, like in silent movies, like the old films. When the camera started to move, it was only to get to get somewhere interesting.”
One spectacular sequence at the start of the film shows Thomas and Erika Mann looking through the car window at the wreckage of the war. “We needed to have an archival moment without using archives,” said Pawlikowski. “We found a street, which was pretty damaged, in a part of Poland which used to belong to Germany. We built some ruins in the foreground, but they’re not painted in, they’re really there. And we found the right extras to look right and busy themselves, and then with digital we painted out satellite dishes and modern windows. We wanted to establish this basic principle where you have an intimate relationship at the center, father-daughter in a capsule, they’re protected from the world. The whole film is about a big vista and a small relationship.”
[Editor’s note: Spoilers for the conclusion of the film follow.]
At the end of the movie, as the Manns leave Weimar to go back West, they see a ruin of an old church. They skip out on their escort and enter the church. “It’s a mutual understanding and urge to see something that’s not official, that’s not part of the official program,” said Pawlikowski. “They’re tuning the organ, which is damaged, when they come in. They happen to play a Bach chorale, play it badly, but still strong enough for us to be moved, and it’s only more moving because it’s a broken organ, and it’s bad. But it still works.”
The music opens up the floodgates for the audience as they mourn Klaus and feel the elegy for everything that’s lost. “You don’t know how to achieve it,” said Pawlikowski. “It’s not so easy, because you write it, imagine it, play the music, and you get moved. But we have to find a church. Then we have to find an organ to put in that church. Then we have to like create an atmosphere where the actors do it in an accidental organic way: how do you engineer that? By the time we shot the scene, they were really close, Sandra and Hanns, and Hanns had some personal grief that he was working through, so the first take, it worked. She takes his hand. That’s the beauty of cinema, when you have good photography and within it you have things that seem to unfold mysteriously rather than like pressing buttons.”
“Fatherland” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it at a later date.
