Fatherland

In 1933, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann left Nazi Germany and eventually ended up in the US. In 1949, at the height of the Cold War, he returned to Germany with his daughter Erika to mark the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth, a country now divided into the Federal Republic and the GDR.  He was received with every honour in both West and East Germany, whilst Erika travelled alongside him in his shadow as his personal assistant. The journey, which takes them from Frankfurt in West Germany to Weimar in East Germany, becomes an eventful road trip in which Mann is confronted not only with the ruins of his divided homeland, but also with a tragedy within his own family.

Just as in his earlier films Ida and Cold War, the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski impressively weaves the history of post-war Europe into personal stories – in this case, that of the strained relationship between a father and his daughter. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller portray the writer and his daughter.