‘Vaterland’ director Pawel Pawlikowski: ‘Thomas Mann was a kind of Don Quixote’

“Thomas Mann was a kind of Don Quixote,” Pawel Pawlikowski says while discussing “Vaterland,” his film about the writer’s return from American exile to a Germany still scarred by war.

The story follows Mann’s daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller, as she accompanies her father on a tour through the divided postwar country. Pawlikowski presents the journey as a formative scene in the new postwar order.

In an interview in Berlin, the Polish director discusses the complex figures who populate his films, the hysteria of the digital sphere and his aunt in Poland. He has emerged as one of the figures associated with a formally strict, thematically ambitious strand of European cinema.

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Thomas Mann was a kind of Don Quixote.