“I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid,” Paweł Pawlikowski, the Academy Award-winning director of films including “Ida,” “Cold War,” and, most recently, “Fatherland,” said. The only practical training he has ever had in filmmaking was a single, local workshop he attended in England. “Here was a medium in which I could combine all my failures,” Pawlikowski said, of cinema. His films—about writers, exiles, and Eastern European art—examines the mysteries of borders, both spiritual and political. His latest, “Fatherland,” which won him the prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in May, takes up the life of the German novelist Thomas Mann. About his own sense of home, Pawlikowski tells Anthony Lane: “Every film has to be a roof over my head for three years.” Read Lane’s full Profile of the director: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
- “I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid,” Paweł Pawlikowski, the Academy Award-winning director of films including “Ida,” “Cold War,” and, most recently, “Fatherland,” said. The only practical training he has ever had in filmmaking was a single, local workshop he attended in England. “Here was a medium in which I could combine all my failures,” Pawlikowski said, of cinema. His films—about writers, exiles, and Eastern European art—examines the mysteries of borders, both spiritual and political. His latest, “Fatherland,” which won him the prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in May, takes up the life of the German novelist Thomas Mann. About his own sense of home, Pawlikowski tells Anthony Lane: “Every film has to be a roof over my head for three years.” Read Lane’s full Profile of the director: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…