16/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: The Polish director shares some reflections on his new work, focused on the return of Thomas Mann from his US exile to post-war Germany(s)

(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

Fatherland, entered in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, can easily and organically be seen as the third instalment in Paweł Pawlikowski’s tales of Cold War-era Europe and the aftermath of World War II (the others being Cold War and Ida). The Polish director shared some reflections on his new work, focused on the celebrated, and also troubled, return of Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann from his US exile to post-war Germany(s).

Cineuropa: Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933 for the USA and returned to Germany after the end of World War II. You left Poland for the UK in 1972, during the Cold War years, and have now returned. Do you feel you share a certain DNA with him in this regard?
Paweł Pawlikowski: Yes and no. He was a fully grown and successful adult, and I was a 14-year-old boy who was trying to make sense of things and learn English, of which I didn’t know a word. I felt like a total idiot. Obviously, Mann was not.

Why, then, did you choose him as the protagonist-catalyst?
I felt that Mann and his children Erika and Klaus felt like a strong combination, or concoction even. They’re put up against a divided Germany that, on one hand, is very crude and, on the other, is… also crude but a bit more interesting. There’s also that kind of quite amazing and weird love triangle between father, son and daughter – symbiotic, and powerful with love, loyalty and resentment, in a rich mix. So, I decided to sculpt it together into a piece.

You’ve trimmed much of this down, though, to the bare minimum. How do you manage to be so bare-bones, as demonstrated by many of your films?
By elimination. By creating scenes that don’t have to explain anything, and that are just strong and interesting. It’s an ongoing process while writing, re-writing and reducing, while still keeping things comprehensible – to get that scene with an inner life of its own. It’s something I’ve developed over the years in my movies – trying to get the scene to resonate without being too explanatory or didactic.

As seen in Fatherland, Cold War and Ida, the black-and-white cinematography in the 1:33 Academy ratio seems to go well together with this thinking. Do you remember when you started to get drawn to that concept?
With Ida. My previous film had been rather conventional, where you’d see exactly which buttons were being pressed, a movie grammar that frankly made me feel impatient. Plus, we didn’t have much money on Ida. “Let’s just make something totally photographic,” I thought – we won’t move the camera; we’ll contain everything like a photograph, partly inspired by my own Polish family albums from the 1960s. “Let’s try to recreate that,” we said; “Let’s compose it like perhaps Bergman and Bresson did in the past.” It became like an education for me, a very nice experience.

You have put a lot of work into each depiction, with subtle details suggesting and defining the settings and the era. Can you talk about this process?
I try to show things interestingly, at times unexpectedly, to place little fragments into the picture, the dialogue and the narration, ever so subtly. It comes from having made movies for a while now, and I love to create these worlds, much more so than the world of today.

The presence of Hans Zichler and Sandra Hüller is also central. They work well with the time and setting.
Both were no-brainers. Sandra is a timeless personality, and Hans has a natural elegance and a great sense of irony that work perfectly here. I also found out that he had recorded the diaries of Mann for a very ambitious podcast. It’s safe to say that he knew his homework inside out. August Diehl, who plays Klaus, was an admirer of Klaus Mann’s literature in real life. It all fell together beautifully organically.

Is Fatherland the third part of a trilogy together with Ida and Cold War?
It works like that, doesn’t it? Though it wasn’t the immediate plan.

Do you have more stories like this inside of you, black and white and set in post-war Europe? Perhaps enough for a decalogue? Being Polish, you should have some licence to do so.
Ooh, then you really have to be hard-working. Kieslowski did all ten in a year and a half. I’m a bit lazy. But I hope to make something like this again. I’m actually working on something at the moment, but it’s too early to talk about it.

Lastly, why the title Fatherland?
It’s a heavy word, isn’t it? It took some time to come to me, but the dialogue in the beginning, between Erika and Klaus, suggested it would work well. And Mann used it in his speeches during this period; he kind of redeemed it from the Nazis, who had used it so much that it was unspeakable for a while. Mann managed to make it unembarrassing again.