Pawlikowski’s Cannes pick
Coverage highlighted Paweł Pawlikowski’s film FATHERLAND starring Sandra Hüller as part of a lineup critics say engages with 20th‑century authoritarian brutality in Europe. (backrowmanifesto.substack.com)
Paweł Pawlikowski’s *Fatherland*, starring Sandra Hüller, is headed to the main competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. (festival-cannes.com) Festival organizers listed *Fatherland* in Competition on April 9, and the 79th edition of Cannes is scheduled to run from May 12 to May 23, 2026. (festival-cannes.com) The film centers on German novelist Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika Mann during a Cold War road trip across a devastated Germany, from Frankfurt in the United States zone to Weimar in the Soviet zone, according to distributor materials. Hanns Zischler plays Thomas Mann and Hüller plays Erika Mann. (deadline.com) Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, and Erika Mann built her own public life as a writer, actor and anti-fascist campaigner. That makes the film a family story rooted in Germany’s fight over memory after Nazism and war. (britannica.com, encyclopedia.com) Pawlikowski has returned to this terrain before. *Ida* won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015, and *Cold War* won him Cannes’ best director prize in 2018. (opusfilm.com, festival-cannes.com) Hüller also arrives with recent Cannes and Oscar visibility. She starred in *Anatomy of a Fall* and *The Zone of Interest*, and earned an Academy Award nomination for best actress for *Anatomy of a Fall*. (hollywoodreporter.com) The production brings together companies from Italy, Poland, Germany and France, with MUBI holding rights in North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Benelux, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and India. The Match Factory is handling international sales. (ourfilms.it, deadline.com) Cannes’ 2026 competition includes new films from Asghar Farhadi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, László Nemes, Ira Sachs and Andrey Zvyagintsev alongside Pawlikowski. In that field, *Fatherland* lands as another European historical drama from a director whose last two major features were both Cannes fixtures. (festival-cannes.com, variety.com) The immediate next step is simple: Cannes will give *Fatherland* its first major test in May, in the same competition where Pawlikowski has already won once. (festival-cannes.com, festival-cannes.com)
