Winner: Best Director, 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Poland’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards

Academy Award–nominated director Paweł Pawlikowski (COLD WAR, FF 2018) specializes in narratively economical yet emotionally and philosophically expansive historical drama, and his latest film, which earned him a Best Director prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, might be his most potent and provocative yet. Set in the aftermath of World War II, Fatherland follows the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller, also at this year’s Fall Focus in ROSE) on a fictionalized 1949 road trip across a torn Germany that’s at once reeling from the destruction of battle and in profound denial about its evils and culpability. As they move from the East to the occupied West, Pawlikowski uses Thomas and Erika’s fraught interpersonal dynamics and own familial tragedies to reflect upon a country facing an ever-evolving moral urgency. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s beautifully stark black-and-white frames and Hüller and Zischler’s expertly restrained performances combine to evoke a Europe gradually awakening to a new historical reckoning.

—New York Film Festival guide