24/05/2026

Cannes 2026: Paweł Pawlikowski Wins Best Director for Fatherland

Paweł Pawlikowski has received the Best Director award at the 79th Cannes Film Festival for Fatherland . It marks the second such distinction of his career — he previously won the same award for Cold War, which later went on to receive three Academy Award nominations: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography.

Fatherland, screened in Competition, had from the outset been among the most widely discussed titles of this year’s Cannes edition. The film premiered on the festival’s third day and quickly emerged as one of the leading contenders for the Palme d’Or. That standing was confirmed by the festival’s most prestigious critical ranking, published by the industry journal Screen Daily: in the final Jury Grid, Pawlikowski’s film secured first place with an average score of 3.3, ahead of, among others, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur.

The Best Director prize was awarded to Pawlikowski ex aequo with Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, directors of La Bola Negra. The Palme d’Or went to Cristian Mungiu for Fjord, the Grand Prix was awarded to Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, while the Jury Prize went to Valeska Grisebach for The Dreamed Adventure.

Fatherland is set in 1949, in postwar Germany divided by emerging political realities. Thomas Mann, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, returns after years of exile in the United States to the country he had left following the rise of the Nazis. Accompanying him is his daughter Erika Mann — writer, actress, war correspondent, and at once the person closest to him and the one most merciless toward the mythology surrounding her father.

Father and daughter travel across the ruins of Germany in a black Buick: from Frankfurt, situated in the Western sphere of influence, to Weimar, associated with Goethe yet already operating within the reality of the Communist East. Public ceremonies, speeches, and encounters with representatives of new political orders are contrasted with the private tension between Mann and Erika, as well as with dramatic news concerning Klaus Mann, the writer’s son and author of Mephisto.

Sandra Hüller stars as Erika Mann and Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann. The cast also includes August Diehl as Klaus Mann, Joachim Meyerhoff as Gustaf Gründgens, Devid Striesow as Johannes Becher, Anna Madeley, Devid Striesow, and — in a special appearance — Joanna Kulig. The screenplay was written by Paweł Pawlikowski and Henk Handloegten, co-creator of the series Babylon Berlin. Cinematography is by Łukasz Żal, Pawlikowski’s long-time collaborator on Idaand Cold War.

Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen Daily, emphasized the film’s precision and lightness, observing:

“In the period drama Fatherland, Polish writer-director Paweł Pawlikowski has made a film that is inherently impressively weighty in subject matter, yet is realised with a rare lightness — not to say concision — at a refreshingly lean running time of 82 minutes.”

Romney noted that Pawlikowski takes on a figure exceptionally difficult for cinema — Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice — but approaches him through his relationship with his daughter:

“Mann is shown here alongside his daughter and assistant Erika Mann, whose presence — supportive yet critically demanding — gradually and inevitably chips away at the elevated monolith he represents.”

The Screen Daily critic also praised the screenplay by Pawlikowski and Handloegten:

“Pawlikowski and co-writer Henk Handloegten deliver a highly literary screenplay, filled with cultural references — to art, poetry and music — and drawing on excerpts from Mann’s speeches.”

Later in his review Romney wrote:

“The screenplay achieves a dense interweaving of themes: idealism and its illusions; family relationships; the nature of nationality and home; the Cold War struggle to appropriate cultural heritage; the once untouchable status of great male artists; and the Faust legend, developed both by Mann and Goethe.”

The film’s visual dimension occupied a prominent place in Romney’s review. He highlighted Łukasz Żal’s cinematography, the black-and-white imagery, and the Academy ratio frame, all of which connect Fatherland with Pawlikowski’s earlier works:

“Łukasz Żal photographs the film in black and white, in Academy ratio, in a distinctive style that makes Fatherland closely related to the period settings of Ida and Cold War.”

According to Romney, Pawlikowski’s film is simultaneously intellectual and sensuous:

“Alongside its verbal and intellectual dimension, Fatherland is suggestively immersive, genuinely allowing us to feel as if we are visiting the two German states in 1949.”

The critic also singled out the performances:

“Zischler gives Mann a central core of tragic awareness — as a man who protects his emotions beneath armour-plated Olympian gravity — while Hüller delivers yet another exceptional performance.”

Writing about Sandra Hüller, Romney added:

“Her Erika — herself a writer, actress and celebrated war correspondent — appears here to occupy the role of a subordinate assistant to her father, yet reveals flashes of anger and ironic humour, increasingly testing him through both devotion and resistance.”

The film received an equally enthusiastic response from Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who described Fatherland as:

“an impossibly elegant, measured historical miniature, whose concision and control barely contain the personal and historical pain of its characters.”

Bradshaw described Pawlikowski’s film as a story of exile and betrayal, of the impossibility of returning home, and of artists’ children coming to terms with their secondary place in the shadow of greatness. He emphasized that Thomas Mann, as interpreted by Hanns Zischler, becomes a figure of polite withdrawal, diplomatically inscrutable, attempting to rise above history and politics. Erika, portrayed by Sandra Hüller, functions as a counterweight to paternal authority.

“Erika — played by Hüller with her customary bayonet of intelligence — is a torment.”

Bradshaw also noted that Pawlikowski does not construct the film as an easy exercise in nostalgia for a lost world:

“Pawlikowski offers nothing consoling or elegiac in this tense, literary work.”

Fatherland joins the continuum of Pawlikowski’s most significant films, in which history does not merely serve as background but directly shapes intimate relationships between characters. As in Ida and Cold War, the director returns to memory, identity, guilt, family, and love in a world after catastrophe. This time, however, the centre of gravity is neither romance nor spiritual awakening, but the relationship between a daughter and a father — an artist whose public stature does not exempt him from private responsibility.

The film is a co-production between Poland, Germany, Italy, and France. Producers include Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli of OUR Films, Ewa Puszczyńska of Extreme Emotions, Jeanne Tremsal and Edward Berger of Nine Hours, Dimitri Rassam of Chapter 2, and Lorenzo Gangarossa of Circle One. On the Polish side, co-producing partners include Canal+ Polska, Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych we Wrocławiu, Dolnośląskie Centrum Filmowe, and Instytucja Filmowa Silesia-Film. The film was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute and by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Polish distribution will be handled by Kino Świat. Fatherland is scheduled for theatrical release on 19 June.