Following its world premiere in Competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski won Best Director for the second time after 2018‘s Cold War, Ojczyzna (Fatherland) is another monochrome historical snapshot focusing on a couple swept up by the tides of history.
Instead of lovers, it centers on a father, German Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann (“Death in Venice”, “Doctor Faustus”) and his daughter, Erika.
Thomas (Hanns Zischler) is heading back to his native Germany only four years after the end of the war. Having left in 1933 for the US, the returning national treasure is about to receive two honours just a few days apart.
The first is in West Germany under American occupation. The second is in East Germany under Soviet rule. Both sides wish to claim Mann as one of their own, with the West Germans hoping the celebrated cultural figure will embrace capitalism, while the East Germans make the case that Goethe, Mann’s great influence, would have agreed with Marxist values.
Erika (Sandra Hüller) is reluctant to accompany her father to the place she once called home. The same applies to her disillusioned brother Klaus (August Diehl), who is residing in France and whose book “Mephisto” was banned for its anti-Nazi stance.
