“Fatherland,” the latest film by Oscar-winning Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, will open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival. The director will attend the gala screening on Aug. 14.
“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 (Sandra Hüller) – 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 16 years of exile in the U.S., Thomas 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. 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,” said Pawlikowski.
His documentary film “Serbian Epics” (1992) was screened in the early days of the Sarajevo Film Festival. His feature “Cold War” opened the 24th Sarajevo Film Festival. The following year, in 2019, Pawlikowski was honored with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, alongside a retrospective of his work presented within the Tribute To program.
