Pawlikowski has created another Event. Taking us on the 1949 journey of Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika to the two Germanies, this drama of ideas is strikingly relevant today in its perspective on the world. The film, which earned the Polish master his second Best Director award at Cannes, reflects on the postwar reality and the landscape of loss.

It is 1949. Writer Thomas Mann returns home after exile in the USA. Together with his daughter Erika, he travels to receive dzimtenē pēc trimdas ASV. Together with his daughter Erika, he travels to the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic to receive literary honours. Frankfurt and Weimar represent two faces of postwar Germany. One is bustling with Americans, journalists and security services, while the other is populated by committed communists, wavering communists and singing pioneers. The spirit of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer survives only in books. Thomas and Erika rediscover their homeland, but the only thing they can recognise is the time lost.

As in Pawlikowski’s previous works – the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language Film Ida (2013) and the three-time Oscar-nominated Cold War (2018) – he conceptualises the past and, working once again with his longtime cinematographer Łukasz Żal, tells the story “without colour”. Presented in the main competition at Cannes, the film is an example of anti-biographical filmmaking: it speaks of a return to a homeland that can no longer return to itself, while those who have returned are ghostly figures from a past everyone wishes to forget. The intellectual figures portrayed by actors Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller journey not only through a divided country but also through their own family, which history has marked with deep fractures and personal tragedies (August Diehl portrays their son, the writer Klaus Mann). Pawlikowski has said that he feels lost in today’s age, where the brave new world and barbarism exist side by side; the Mann family’s journey marks the culmination of a confusion that never truly had a beginning or an end.