Fatherland

In Paweł Pawlikowski’s third post-WWII meditation, exiled author Thomas Mann tours a devastated Germany whose divisions echo his own fractured family.

In 1949, ageing German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann breaks his long exile from his homeland to honour Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 200th anniversary in the latter’s birthplace of Frankfurt, West Germany. Next, he plans to visit the city where the literary giant died: Weimar, now in the communist East. Chauffeured by his resentful actor/writer daughter Erika, Thomas crosses a country he barely recognises, even as he waxes poetic about its heritage. Meanwhile, Erika notices in person – as her beloved, tormented brother Klaus does in his fiction – how two divergent but equally compromised regimes are being installed atop the still-festering wounds of Nazism. The country they grew up in is a fading memory; but can this intellectual family even feel at home with one another?

Paweł Pawlikowski’s drama is the third in a thematic triptych of European postwar reverberations – filmed, like its predecessors Ida and Cold War, in luminous black-and-white. Pawlikowski’s immaculate road trip through Germany’s cultural crossroads follows a crisp yet elliptical map of details: disgusted looks at parties; silences in half-empty restaurants; dryly ironic new uses for old infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Manns’ repressed tensions emerge gradually in masterful lead performances by Hanns Zischler (Kings of the Road) and Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), whose brilliantly understated turn as Erika captures a breadth of emotions lurking just below the surface.

German with English subtitles

Festivals & Awards

2026 Cannes Film Festival | Winner: Best Director
2026 Melbourne International Film Festival | Official Selection
2026 Sydney Film Festival | Official Selection

Screening at Luna Leederville from November 12.