Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Fatherland’ to Open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Paweł Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland' will open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, with the director attending the gala screening on Aug. 14 at the event running through Aug. 21.
- 'Fatherland' world-premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where Pawlikowski won best director, and depicts Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika (played by Sandra Hüller) on a 1949 road trip across a divided Germany — from U.S.-dominated Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar.
- Pawlikowski's ties to Sarajevo stretch back decades: his documentary 'Serbian Epics' (1992) screened in the festival's early days, 'Cold War' opened the 24th edition, and he received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo in 2019 alongside a career retrospective.
- Pawlikowski's 'Ida' (2013) was the first Polish film to win the Academy Award for best international feature film, and 'Cold War' (2018) earned three Oscar nominations including best director.
- Pawlikowski said the film — 'steeped in history and in conflict, in situations which are still within living memory in Bosnia' — makes Sarajevo a natural fit, calling the festival a 'very good home' for his last three history-driven films.
Why it matters: The pairing carries deliberate resonance: a film titled 'Fatherland' about a divided post-war Germany opens a festival born from the Bosnian war, and Pawlikowski — a director whose work mines European history and fractured identity — returns to an audience that has championed him since the early 1990s, reinforcing Sarajevo's role as a showcase for films reckoning with the continent's 20th-century wounds.
