Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland' Opens 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival
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- "Fatherland" will open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival on August 14, with director Paweł Pawlikowski attending the gala screening in person; the festival runs August 14-21, 2026.
- The film closes Pawlikowski's Cold War trilogy and won Best Director at Cannes earlier this year.
- The story follows Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a 1949 road trip in a black Buick across divided Germany — from U.S.-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar.
- Mann returns after 16 years of U.S. exile to confront a divided homeland and a fractured family.
- Pawlikowski's ties to Sarajevo stretch back decades — his 1992 documentary "Serbian Epics" screened at the festival's early editions, and "Cold War" opened the 24th edition.
- In 2019, Pawlikowski received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo; his 2013 film "Ida" was the first Polish film to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and took five European Film Awards including Best Film.
Why it matters: Pawlikowski choosing Sarajevo — a festival where he first showed work in 1992 and where his 'Cold War' previously opened the 24th edition — to debut the finale of his Cold War trilogy gives the 32nd Sarajevo a prestige anchor rooted in a decades-long personal relationship, reinforcing the festival's role as a home for historically engaged Eastern European cinema.
