Sandra Hüller is extraordinary in Paweł Pawlikowski’s truly stunning Fatherland, a film that feels all too relevant as Germany once again shifts to the far right.
I went into the screening of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland at this year’s Rome Film Fest ready to be blown away. Pawlikowski had just won Best Director at Cannes 2026, and I absolutely adore his previous films. But Fatherland – from its very opening shot – exceeded even my unreasonably high expectations. Pawlikowski has made another truly stunning film about the intensity of familial bonds, exile, art, belief, betrayal and love.
It is 1949, and German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), who fled the Nazis for exile in California, is returning to his newly divided homeland. Accompanied by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), he visits Frankfurt (in the capitalist West) before travelling to Weimar (in the communist East).
Hüller is, as ever, extraordinary, her performance sharp, intense, totally controlled. The film is devastatingly restrained in its dialogue, while cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s luminous monochrome gives every frame the composure of a painting, complemented by the wonderful invocation of music, art and literature throughout. In his masterclass at the festival, Pawlikowski described the “eccentric framing” of Ida, Cold War and Fatherland (all shot by Żal) as “more photographic than cinematic,” which absolutely shines through.
Although Pawlikowski has said that the three films were never intended as a trilogy, it is difficult not to retrospectively assign this label to Ida, Cold War and Fatherland. All three are shot in black and white in Żal’s fantastic framing, with similar themes running throughout. Each are set in postwar Eastern Europe, a place where history is so present as to be a character in its own right. This period fascinates Pawlikowski, as a time when “ideas were powerful and history impacted people, before our lives were taken over by technology.”
Pawlikowski spoke about his own experience of growing up across different countries and languages, and how it taught him how varied – and often limited – our ways of seeing the world can be. Life, he suggested, is far more paradoxical than most narratives allow, and our own perspectives are always partial. Fatherland embodies this wonderfully, taking real historical figures and allowing them the contradictions, intimacies and uncertainties of fictional characters.
The legacy of the Nazi period in Fatherland sits alongside conversations about capitalism and communism as the overwhelming context that imbues everything, but Pawlikowski – ever a master of subtly – never presumes to preach. At a party celebrating Mann’s work, Erika surveys the crowd of upper class Germans, who are making small talk, drinking champagne and dining amid all their wealth and finery. “Imagine what they were all doing four years ago…” she remarks. Four short years.
In a moment when Germany is once again shifting to the far right, and debates about the divide between East and West are resurfacing, Fatherland presents the relationship between the personal and the political in all its complex ambiguity. It shows how readily extreme ideologies and atrocious histories are justified, and how quick we can be to move on. Movies like Fatherland present what polemic, lecture or history book can often fail to evoke, namely, the empathy and emotion which is, at the end of the day, great art’s real power.
A truly five-star film.
The 21st edition of the Rome Film Fest is running from October 13th to 25th, 2026.
