<\/p>\n
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski decided to make a film set in the divided Germany of 1949 because he doesn\u2019t understand the state of the world in 2026, the filmmaker said at a Friday press conference at the Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n
Pawlikowski, whose \u201cIda\u201d won the 2013 Oscar for Best International Feature Film and who was nominated for Best Director for \u201cCold War\u201d in 2019, came to Cannes with \u201cFatherland,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u00a0am lost today,\u201d he said. \u201cI have no idea what period we are in. That\u2019s why I did a period film.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added,\u00a0\u201cSo I try to make films that kind of convey that life is complicated, and there\u2019s 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 \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The film stars Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann and Sandra H\u00fcller as his daughter, Erika. It is the second movie H\u00fcller 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand that question,\u201d she said. \u201cYes, I feel the guilt every day. And also, I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt, because it\u2019s necessary in order to act right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pawlikowski made \u201cFatherland\u201d after \u201cThe Island,\u201d a film he\u2019d 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\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that could be an interesting film,\u201d he said. \u201cNot a kind of historical reconstruction, but if we can abstract everything away and focus on the \u2026 three characters, and the moment, and reduce what was a complicated long journey.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it\u2019s 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.\u201d He said he made significant to the actual events when Mann went to Germany: \u201cThe actual journey happened with Katia, the wife of Thomas Mann, who wasn\u2019t dramatically so interesting, so we dismissed her and brought in Erica, (who) was very interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cOnce you throw things in and start eliminating, adding, eliminating, condensing, you end up with something that\u2019s very rich on a human level, historical level,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething that can be told very simply.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFatherland\u201d is screening in the Main Competition in Cannes, and has received some of the most positive reviews of the festival so far.<\/p>\n
Sharon Waxman contributed to this report.<\/p>\n
The post \u2018Fatherland\u2019 Director Pawel Pawlikowski Says He Made a Period Movie Because \u2018I Am Lost Today\u2019<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski decided to make a film set in the divided Germany of 1949 because he doesn\u2019t understand the state of the world in 2026, the filmmaker said at a Friday press conference at the Cannes Film Festival. Pawlikowski, whose \u201cIda\u201d won the 2013 Oscar for Best International Feature Film and who was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2417889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[326557,473422,473421,412259,452680,471264],"class_list":["post-2417888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-daughter-erika","tag-fatherland","tag-pawel-pawlikowski","tag-sandra-huller","tag-thomas-mann"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/\u2018Fatherland-Director-Pawel-Pawlikowski-Says-He-Made-a-Period-Movie.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2417888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2417890,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417888\/revisions\/2417890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2417889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2417888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2417888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2417888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}