Poland Submits Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland' for Oscars — SkimNews
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- Poland selected Paweł Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland' as its official entry for the Oscars international feature film race.
- 'Fatherland' is a black-and-white post-WWII drama that world-premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Pawlikowski won the best director award; the film follows novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a 1949 road trip across Germany.
- The cast also includes August Diehl, Devid Striesow, and Anna Madeley, with Pawlikowski co-writing the screenplay alongside Henk Handloegten.
- Although the film is set in Germany, production mainly shot in Poland; Pawlikowski reunited with longtime collaborators including cinematographer Łukasz Żal, costume designer Aleksandra Staszko, and production designers Katarzyna Sobańska and Marcel Sławiński.
- Producers span five countries — Mubi (unaffiliated), Our Films (Italy), Extreme Emotions (Poland), Nine Hours (Germany), and Chapter 2 (France) — with additional collaboration from Circle One, Apocalypso Pictures, Arte, and Pathé.
- The submission lands as fellow Cannes competition titles 'Minotaur' and 'La Bola Negra' were submitted by France and Spain, respectively, intensifying the international feature race.
Why it matters: Pawlikowski's Cannes best-director prize immediately positions 'Fatherland' as a heavyweight among this year's international feature submissions, and its five-country European production slate signals unusually broad institutional backing. With Sandra Hüller in the lead and a Pawlikowski-Łukasz Żal reunion on cinematography, the film carries the same creative DNA as the director's most celebrated work.
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