Pawel Pawlikowski’s seventh feature, Fatherland, arrived at Cannes Film Fest with high expectations, and judging from the audience and critical reaction, it should win prizes. After all, this is the Polish filmmaker behind Oscar nominee Cold War (2018) and Oscar winner Ida (2013).
My Oscar Book:
Reflecting European history through complicated characters, the film was shot in black-and-white in the Academy ratio, thus making it a panel in an acclaimed 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 begins with five-and-a-half minute 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 twin to come on a road trip with her back to Germany as their father is about to accept the Goethe prize.
Klaus’ Suicide
PP: Suddenly, I knew I had a critical mass for a film. The historical context that was also psychological, with his triangular family drama.
Real People as Characters?
PP: We hint at Erika’s lesbianism, when an American journalist flirts with her. It’s hinted that she had a relationship with Betty, one of the journalists who crops up. Erika just cuts it short now, because she’s on a mission, and that affair is long in the past.
Erika: Nipo Baby
PP: In West Germany, Erika attends a fancy cocktail party, where she runs into her handsome ex-husband (Joachim Meyerhoff), now 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, Without the father, they would have no money, no contacts, none of the lifestyle they had. They lived on the Riviera, drove around, were well-educated, and had fantastic connections.
The Slap Scene
PP: “You watch the transformation of her face, and it really happens. She doesn’t seem to be acting. She has this fake smile, and then look in her eyes. There was one take where things come to the surface, brilliantly, in a way that’s not scripted and not acted, it mysteriously unfolds.
Single Take Prologue
PP: We 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. He was totally open into for that kind of musical approach to performance. The whole thing had integrity to it.
Klaus pops up in the movie a few times like a hovering ghost. “That was tricky decision. I’ve never done that in my life. But this kind of astral projection, if somebody dies, it has been recorded, and Erika is missing and craving him.”
Road Movie
PP: One of Erika’s many skills was driving, which she does in the movie, ferrying Mann around in a giant glossy Buick. She did long distance rallies, and drove often with Klaus. They drove to Kazakhstan, across the Steppes. She wrote with Klaus about driving around the Riviera. The Buick was a difficult car to drive, so Sandra had to really practice a lot, and she’s a really a good driver herself. But this car is really heavy, and the gears are tricky, so it took a bit of prep.”
PP: Cnematographer Łukasz Żal returns, but bringing more camera movement than ever before. Everything results from the material, it’s not like I’m imposing this style. I like the photography to be strong and concentrated, but then you do whatever is right. It’s a road movie, but the camera moves when it has to move; it doesn’t move just to have cinematic gesture. It’s super primitive and simple, like silent movies, like old films. When the camera started to move, it was only to get to get somewhere interesting.
Thomas and Erika looking at the wreckage of the war
PP: We needed to have an archival moment without using archives. We found a street, which was pretty damaged, in a part of Poland that used to belong to Germany. We built some ruins in the foreground, but they’re not painted in, they’re really there. 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 principle where you have intimate relationship at the center, father-daughter in capsule, they’re protected from the world.
The whole film is about a big vista and a small relationship.
PP: The Manns leaveing Weimar to go back West, and they enter into a ruined old church. It’s a mutual understanding and urge to see something that’s not official, that’s not part of the program. They’re tuning the organ, which is damaged. They happen to play–badly–a Bach chorale, but still strong enough for us to be moved, and it’s more moving because it’s a broken organ.
Mournful Music
PP: “You don’t know how to achieve it. 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 unfold mysteriously rather than like pressing buttons.”
Fatherland premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Fest to great critical acclaim MUBI will release it at a later date.
