In the summer of 1949, the earliest days of the Cold War, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller, ANATOMY OF A FALL, CIFF 2023; TONI ERDMANN, CIFF 2016) embark on a challenging and emotional road trip across a Germany in ruins – from US dominated Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar. Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the United States, Mann has to face not only a divided fatherland, but also deep fracture within his own family.

With FATHERLAND, Academy Award®-winner Pawel Pawlikowski picks up where he left off with his award-winning IDA and COLD WAR (CIFF 2018), exploring – in his elliptic, distilled way – the themes of identity, family, love and guilt amid the turmoil and confusion of post-war Europe.