Paweł Pawlikowski's 82-Minute Fatherland Brings Thomas Mann's Exile Return to Cannes

Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland runs 82 minutes, making it by his reckoning the shortest film in Cannes Film Festival's main competition, a lineup dominated by long runtimes. The 69-year-old Polish director admits he may have trimmed the final cut by a few minutes partly to unsettle festival selectors, noting his contract stipulated a minimum of 90 minutes. The film fictionalises Thomas Mann's postwar journey back from exile to a Germany newly divided into two states, where the Nobel laureate and anti-Nazi campaigner delivers speeches on both sides of the Iron Curtain while dignitaries compete for his legacy. Sandra Hüller plays his daughter, the writer and activist Erika, who accompanies him at his request knowing the trip will be a circus; in reality Mann travelled with his wife, Katia. August Diehl appears as Erika's troubled younger brother Klaus, notably absent from the journey. Producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli sent Pawlikowski Colm Tóibín's fictional biography The Magician, which sparked the project, though he declined to adapt it and instead focused on the return and Mann's relationship with his two eldest children. The film completes a trilogy begun with Ida (2013) and continued with Cold War (2018), both shaped by Łukasz Żal's black-and-white cinematography and Academy 4:3 framing. Pawlikowski, who left the UK for Warsaw in 2006, describes himself as a rebel against contemporary cinema's length and noise. Fatherland reaches UK cinemas on 23 October.