Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland' Opens 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival — SkimNews
SkimNews Take
Programming a Cold War German divide story to open Sarajevo — a city whose 1990s rupture still shapes its identity — links the festival's host city's history of fragmentation to the film's central tension.
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- Pawlikowski will attend the gala opening of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival on Aug. 14, where 'Fatherland' screens as the opening film; the festival runs through Aug. 21.
- 'Fatherland' had its world premiere at Cannes earlier this year, where Pawlikowski won the best director award.
- The film stars Hanns Zischler as Nobel-winning writer Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller as his daughter Erika, following a 1949 road trip in a black Buick from U.S.-dominated Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar, with Mann returning from 16 years of U.S. exile to a divided 'fatherland.'
- Pawlikowski cited the film's themes of 'history and conflict' as fitting for Sarajevo, noting Bosnia's living memory of such situations, and highlighted his long relationship with festival founder Mirsad Purivatra and director Jovan Marjanović.
- Pawlikowski's ties to Sarajevo stretch back decades: his 1992 documentary 'Serbian Epics' screened in the festival's early days, and 'Cold War' opened the 24th edition in 2018; he received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo in 2019 alongside a career retrospective.
- 'Ida' (2013) became the first Polish film to win the Academy Award for best international feature and took five European Film Awards; 'Cold War' (2018) earned three Oscar nominations, including best director, and five European Film Awards.
Why it matters: Pawlikowski's choice to screen a film about Cold War–era German division at Sarajevo — a city that endured its own 1990s siege — is a deliberate curatorial pairing: festival organizers gain a prestige opening from a director with a documented relationship to the event, while Sarajevo's audience gets a work whose themes of fractured identity and return-from-exile resonate locally.
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