As World War II moves out of living memory, melancholy study ‘Fatherland’ feels like the first post-postwar film

Fatherland is another black-and-white gem from Pawel Pawlikowski. The old world is dead, and a new world struggles to be born...For more than a decade, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski has been grappling with the paradoxes of postwar Europe, in the clashing of both the newfound freedoms and the stifling communism that arose from the ashes of World War II. Both his 2014 film Ida (about a sheltered young nun in 1960s Poland) and 2018’s Cold War (about Polish musicians in the 1950s straining at the bounds of fascism) were hugely acclaimed (even if, perhaps, overly so): Ida won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, and Pawlikowski took Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for Cold War, among many other laurels. But his latest, Fatherland, third in this thematic trilogy, is something subtly grander and much more profound: This feels like perhaps the first post-postwar film.

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