Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller, is set to open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.
The director will personally welcome audiences at the gala screening in the Bosnia and Herzegovina capital on Aug. 14 with the film that rounds up his Cold War trilogy.
Fatherland had its world premiere at Cannes this year, earning Pawlikowski the best director award. The film centers on the relationship between the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Hüller) — an actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, father and daughter embark on a challenging and emotional road trip in a black Buick taking them across a Germany in ruins, from U.S.-dominated Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar. Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the U.S., Mann has to face not only a divided fatherland, but also a deep fracture within his own family.
“It seems like the film suits Sarajevo Film Festival because it’s steeped in history and in conflict, in situations which are still within living memory in Bosnia,” said Pawlikowski. “It feels like a good context to show the film. And I have a relationship with the Sarajevo Film Festival that stretches back for decades.”
