Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland to Open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival

Fatherland, the new film by Oscar® winning director Paweł Pawlikowski, will open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival. The director will personally welcome audiences at the gala screening on August 14, 2026 with the film that rounds up his Cold War trilogy.

Fatherland had its world premiere at Cannes this year, earning Pawlikowski the Best Director award.

 

The film centres on the relationship between the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) - actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, father and daughter embark on a challenging and emotional road trip in a black Buick taking them across a Germany in ruins - from US dominated Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar. Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the US, Thomas Mann has to face not only a divided fatherland, but also a deep fracture within his own family.

 

“It seems like the film suits Sarajevo Film Festival because it's steeped in history and in conflict, in situations which are still within living memory in Bosnia. It feels like a good context to show the film. And I have a relationship with the Sarajevo Film Festival that stretches back for decades”, said Pawlikowski.

 

His documentary film Serbian Epics (1992) was screened in the early days of the Sarajevo Film Festival. His feature Cold War opened the 24th Sarajevo Film Festival. The following year, in 2019, Pawlikowski was honoured with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, alongside a retrospective of his work presented within the Tribute To programme.

 

“This is a festival that I feel very close to. I value the relationships I formed in Sarajevo with Miro, with Jovan. It is a kind of real relationships with people who are film lovers, but also have a sense of history. My films, especially the last three which are steeped in history, have a very good home there. I'm very happy to be back and very thrilled that it's the opening film of the festival”, said Pawlikowski, highlighting his many years of successful cooperation with Sarajevo Film Festival founder Mirsad Purivatra and Festival’s director Jovan Marjanović.

 

Paweł Pawlikowski is a Polish filmmaker who began his career directing award-winning documentaries before moving into narrative features with Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004), both BAFTA-winning films.

 

His film Ida (2013) won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, the first Polish film to do so. It also won five European Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenwriter. Cold War (2018) premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where Pawlikowski was awarded the Best Director Award, and later received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Director. It also won five awards at the 2018 European Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenwriter.

The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival will take place from 14 to 21 August 2026.