EXCLUSIVE: After a long, eight-year hiatus, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski has finally returned to feature filmmaking with Fatherland, which debuts this evening at the Cannes Film Festival. We can share a first-look clip from the film above. 

Pawlikowski directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Hendrik Handloegten. Pawlikowski also co-edited the project with Piotr Wójcik. The film centres on the relationship between the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). 

The official synopsis reads: “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.” 

Starring alongside Zischler and Hüller are August Diehl (The Disappearance of Josef Mengele), Devid Striesow (Yella), and Anna Madeley (In Bruges). Pawlikowski also re-teamed with cinematographer Łukasz Żal to shoot the film. 

In his director’s statement, Pawlikowski said that Fatherland contends with the “turmoils of history, with exile and with our transcendental need for home and belonging.” 

“It also brings together a dramatic historical moment with a very particular human story. But while the characters in Ida and Cold War were invented, at the centre of Fatherland, we have the historical figures of Thomas Mann and his wayward twins, Erika and Klaus, locked in a triangular family drama,” Pawlikowski said. 

“Trying to fuse the personal and the historical in a poignant, mutually enhancing way, we took some liberties with historical facts and their chronology, while trying to stay faithful to the emotional and intellectual truth of the matter.” 

The Match Factory is handling international sales on Fatherland. Mubi holds rights in North America, Latin America, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Benelux, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

The film debuts today in competition. Check out the clip above.