Fatherland
Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War, Ida) won the Best Director Award at Cannes for this road movie, set in 1949, about a car journey undertaken by the writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) through a devastated and divided Germany.
It’s 1949 and the German-born Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann is living in the U.S., an exile known for his decades of fierce protest against Hitler. After witnessing the brutal descent of his nation into barbarism from afar, he accepts a joint Soviet-U.S. invitation to revisit and give lectures in Germany.
Hanns Zischler’s wondrous performance conveys both Mann’s vast humane intellect and his cold, forbidding egotism as he confronts his past and his homeland’s sins. Sandra Hüller matches him with her clear-eyed, angrily funny turn as his daughter Erika, who is impatient with the circus that suddenly surrounds her father.
In appealing black and white, writer-director Paweł Pawlikowski and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Hamnet), his regular collaborator, echo the pain of coming home through the war-ravaged landscapes, which are desolate and yet beautiful: an unforgettable setting for a solemn, precise, exquisite jewel-like poem of loss and mourning. (source: Telluride Film Festival)