Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski decided to make a film set in the divided Germany of 1949 because he doesn’t understand the state of the world in 2026, the filmmaker said at a Friday press conference at the Cannes Film Festival.
Pawlikowski, whose “Ida” won the 2013 Oscar for Best International Feature Film and who was nominated for Best Director for “Cold War” in 2019, came to Cannes with “Fatherland,” which follows the German author Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they travel back to post-World War II Germany to receive an award in 1949. Asked at the press conference if he felt parallels to today, Pawlikowski demurred.
“I am lost today,” he said. “I have no idea what period we are in. That’s why I did a period film.”
He added, “So I try to make films that kind of convey that life is complicated, and there’s no one narrative, and everyone is paradoxical in some way. And try and convey that in the simplest possible way, which cinema can do well through images, scenes, sound, sound …”
The film stars Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller as his daughter, Erika. It is the second movie Hüller has made in which she plays a German character during the period around the Second World War, and she immediately responded to a question about whether she feels guilt when playing Nazi-era German women.
“I understand that question,” she said. “Yes, I feel the guilt every day. And also, I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt, because it’s necessary in order to act right.”
Pawlikowski made “Fatherland” after “The Island,” a film he’d been working on for three years with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, fell apart two weeks before the start of filming because of the actors strike. He was sent a script about Thomas Mann, and zeroed in on one specific moment in the writer’s life.
“I thought that could be an interesting film,” he said. “Not a kind of historical reconstruction, but if we can abstract everything away and focus on the … three characters, and the moment, and reduce what was a complicated long journey.
“And it’s a family story in it, an incredible historical context as well, which is always something that I like doing: telling history through people, through relationships.” He said he made significant to the actual events when Mann went to Germany: “The actual journey happened with Katia, the wife of Thomas Mann, who wasn’t dramatically so interesting, so we dismissed her and brought in Erica, (who) was very interesting.”
He added that a key death that takes place early in the film actually happened three months earlier, and said he added several other characters, including the grandsons of composer Richard Wagner. “Once you throw things in and start eliminating, adding, eliminating, condensing, you end up with something that’s very rich on a human level, historical level,” he said. “Something that can be told very simply.”
“Fatherland” is screening in the Main Competition in Cannes, and has received some of the most positive reviews of the festival so far.
Sharon Waxman contributed to this report.
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