Few actors are having a bigger 2026 than Sandra Hüller, who appears in a diverse slate of indie and studio films that includes “Project Hail Mary,” “Rose,” “Digger,” and “Fatherland.” The latter sees the German actress teaming with Polish auteur Pawel Pawlikowski to play Erika Mann, the daughter of “Buddenbrooks” author Thomas Mann. The film‘s “Wild Strawberries”-esque premise sees Erika accompanying her aging father on a road trip in order to accept a literary award.
Hanns Zischler stars as the esteemed German author, with the ensemble cast rounded out by August Diehl, Joachim Meyerhoff, Devid Striesow, Anna Madeley, and David Menkin. Producers include Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Mieli, Ewa Puszczyńska, Jeanne Termsal, Edward Berger, Dimitri Rassam, and Lorenzo Gangarossa.
“Fatherland” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received as a quintessential example of the brand of filmmaking that Pawlikowski has been honing for the past three decades.
“The aching black-and-white, the Academy aspect ratio, the streak of fatalism running between dueling identities — you know when you’re in a Pawel Pawlikowski movie,” IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his Cannes review. “His latest, ‘Fatherland,’ takes us on a melancholy road trip from U.S.-operated Frankfurt to Soviet-run Weimar in Germany with ‘The Magic Mountain’ author Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika in 1949.”
The review continued, “About as sentimental as any film by the Polish auteur gets — which is to say not at all, despite one long-delayed tear finally shed — it’s another austere, rigorously crafted odyssey through European postwar regret. Stylistically aligned with ‘Ida’ and ‘Cold War‘ to perhaps complete a loose trilogy, ‘Fatherland’ opens an intentionally narrow window onto the strained relationship between Mann and Erika after his 16 years of exile in the United States. Pawlikowski’s elliptical style — keen on empty spaces, minimal dialogue, and crisp cutting — has its limits in terms of achieving an emotional payoff, but the actors’ understated turns make for a captivating (and, at 82 minutes, miraculously short) elegy to a lost homeland at the kickoff of the Cold War.”
A MUBI release, “Fatherland” opens theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, October 23. Watch the trailer below.