Absence & Presence: Poland at the 79th Cannes Film Festival

fatherland-screening-may-14-2026-fot-le-segretain-GettyImages-2276245224.jpg, default, Łukasz Żal, Hanns Zischler, Paweł Pawlikowski, Sandra Hüller and August Diehl attend the 'Fatherland' screening during the 79th annual Cannes Film Fes

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Before the world’s biggest celebration of cinema had even begun, there was a sense that this might be an unusually strong year for Polish Cinema in Cannes. If there’s one thing that critics love doing in Cannes, it’s predicting who’s going to win what. Rumours circulated through the late-night conversations at the Croisette: after years of near misses, perhaps a major award might finally return to Poland.

And this time, it did.

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'Spiritus Sanctus', directed by Michał Toczek, photo: Studio Munka

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Paweł Pawlikowski won Best Director for Fatherland, which premiered in the main competition at the Festival de Cannes. The award crowned one of the strongest Polish presences at the festival in recent years – not only because of Pawlikowski’s success, but because Polish cinema seemed unusually visible across Cannes as a whole.

Asghar Farhadi’s name also came up in conversations about the Polish delegation, as his Parallel Tales is a modern take on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s famed Decalogue. With two Polish co-productions in competition, Polish actors showing up across the sidebars and Michał Toczek’s short film selected for the short competition, there was a sense that something had shifted. At the Polish Pavilion in the Marché du Film – the festival’s vast industry marketplace – the atmosphere was oscillating between cautious optimism and outright excitement.

Beyond the main competition, Polish actors and filmmakers were also present throughout the festival’s parallel sections. Jakub Gierszał appeared in The Meltdown, directed by Manuela Martelli, while Julian Świeżewski starred in Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel, which received a Special Mention for its queer representation. If that wasn’t enough for you, we even heard Chopin playing in the Japanese film by Yukiko Sode, All the Lovers in the Night.

One of the most memorable Polish entries arrived in short form. Michał Toczek’s Spiritus Sanctus imagines a story that could perhaps unfold only in Poland. During a papal visit, a young man desperately searches for a bottle of vodka for his aunt’s birthday, only to discover that every shop in town has been closed for the occasion. Absurd, melancholic and sharply observant, the film turns a simple premise into a portrait of collective ritual and social paralysis. It also feels like the beginning of something larger – the kind of short that quietly announces a feature filmmaker in waiting.

A monochrome trilogy

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Still from the film 'Cold War' directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, photo: promotional materials

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Cannes is hardly unfamiliar territory for Pawlikowski. In 2018, he captivated the festival with Cold War, a film that transformed intimate melodrama into a portrait of post-war Europe suspended between ideology and desire. Before that came Ida, his Academy Award-winning meditation on faith, identity and belonging.

Set in the aftermath of the war, Ida follows a novice nun as she confronts both her family history and the possibility of another life beyond religious devotion. What made the film feel so striking at the time was its restraint. Pawlikowski approached spiritual crisis not through spectacle or revelation, but through silence, gesture and absence, much of that rendered in the visual language of his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal. The result felt unexpectedly new – as though cinema had rediscovered a language it had nearly forgotten.

With Cold War, he expanded that emotional landscape across decades and borders. Love became inseparable from history itself: unstable, fractured and repeatedly interrupted by politics, migration and ideology. The film’s protagonists seemed condemned to orbit one another while Europe rebuilt itself around them. And failed to do so.

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Still from 'Ida', directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, photo: Opus Film

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Now, in 2026, Pawlikowski returns to Cannes with Fatherland, perhaps the most intellectually ambitious chapter of this loose post-war trilogy. The film focuses on several days in the life of Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) following the suicide of Mann’s son Klaus, played by August Diehl.

Where Ida was ascetic and Cold War romantic, Fatherland is dense with intellectual reflection. Pawlikowski no longer examines post-war Europe solely through the Polish experience. Instead, he turns towards Germany – not merely as a nation, but as a psychological and moral landscape shaped by guilt, exhaustion and denial.

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FATHERLAND | Official Trailer | This Fall

That shift in perspective gives the film its unsettling force. There is something deeply provocative in watching a Polish filmmaker dissect the atmosphere of post-war Germany with such emotional precision. Pawlikowski is less interested in historical reckoning than in the texture of collective amnesia. In Fatherland, the war is technically over, yet its presence lingers everywhere: in casual gestures, in bourgeois comfort, in Nazi songs still sung openly on the streets.

If Ida was a film about faith, and Cold War about hope – about the possibility of love surviving within the ruins of Europe – then Fatherland becomes a film about love after devastation. Not romantic love, but love transformed into memory, obligation and grief.

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'Fatherland' directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, photo: Agata Grzybowska / Kino Świat

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For Mann, love for his country and love for his dead son become almost indistinguishable. Both remain painfully present yet emotionally inaccessible, as though mourning itself had been deferred for too long. Pawlikowski approaches these emotions with unusual restraint. Intellect replaces catharsis; distance replaces confession. Mann can speak beautifully about his country, but he actually fails to see it through his own eyes – in Pawlikowski’s tale, he has become a mere monument.

What emerges is a filmmaker constructing his own cinematic discourse on post-war Europe – one less concerned with historical reconstruction than with emotional inheritance. In many ways, Fatherland feels like the film that spiritually precedes both Ida and Cold War, even though it arrives after them chronologically.

The trilogy’s visual coherence would also be impossible without cinematographer Łukasz Żal, whose monochromatic imagery has become inseparable from Pawlikowski’s cinema. Żal’s compositions do not merely illustrate emotion – they create the emotional architecture of the films themselves.

His visual style is sometimes casually compared to Wes Anderson’s for its symmetrical framing and rigorous compositions, though the comparison goes only so far. Żal’s precision lacks irony or decorative playfulness. Instead, the images evoke a distinctly Central European melancholy: empty spaces, compressed interiors and faces trapped within carefully ordered frames.

In Fatherland, that formal control reaches perhaps its purest expression. Despite running only 82 minutes – the shortest film in the main competition – the film feels remarkably dense, layered with historical, literary and emotional tensions. Critics responded enthusiastically. The film topped Screen International’s prestigious Critics Grid for much of the festival and quickly emerged as one of the leading Palme d’Or contenders.

Another thread quietly linking all three films is actress Joanna Kulig. Though central only to Cold War, she appears throughout the trilogy in fleeting stage performances. Each time, Pawlikowski reverses the expected perspective: instead of observing the performer from the audience, the camera looks outward from the stage itself. It is a subtle but revealing gesture. In Pawlikowski’s cinema, post-war Central Europe resembles a theatre in perpetual transformation – a shape-shifting space where identities, ideologies and entire nations perform themselves endlessly before unseen spectators.

A short film about imagination

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Still from 'Parallel Lives', directed by Asghar Farhadi, 2026, photo: Carole Bethuel / Monolith Films

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Premiering on the same day as Fatherland, Asghar Farhadi’s latest project offered Cannes audiences an unexpected return to the emotional terrain associated with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema. Initiated by actor-turned-producer Maciej Musiał, the ambitious international project revisits the world of the Decalogue through films directed by contemporary auteurs. Farhadi’s contribution – a Paris-set reinterpretation of A Short Film About Love – brought together a formidable French cast including Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and Virginie Efira.

The result, however, proved more intellectually intriguing than emotionally convincing. Farhadi’s film never fully escapes the shadow of Kieślowski’s original, yet neither does it attempt a faithful rendition. Instead, it operates somewhere adjacent to it – less concerned with the moral and emotional architecture of love than with the unstable territory of imagination itself.

The connection to Kieślowski remains visible primarily through the motif of voyeurism. Characters observe one another obsessively, projecting desires, fears and fantasies onto lives that remain partially inaccessible. Yet where A Short Film About Love examined intimacy and emotional vulnerability, Farhadi seems more interested in the act of invention: the stories people construct to endure loneliness, uncertainty, or disappointment.

Appropriately, many of the film’s characters are themselves creators – writers, aspiring novelists, foley artists building artificial soundscapes for cinema. What unites them is not romance, but imagination as a form of survival. In Farhadi’s hands, emotional connection becomes inseparable from performance and fabrication, yet we rarely get to delve deeper into the psychological essence of the characters.

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Pierre Niney, Virginie Efira, Asghar Farhadi, Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and Adam Bessa pose during the "Histoires Parallèles" (Parallel Tales) photocall at the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 15, 2026 in Cannes, France, photo: Andreas Rentz / Getty Images

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There is also something quietly ironic about Farhadi’s position within the project. Neither Polish nor French, he enters both cinematic traditions as an outsider. At times, that distance gives the film a curious freedom; at others, it produces a sense of hesitation, as though the director were navigating a cultural landscape whose emotional codes remain slightly out of reach.

The film’s presence in the main competition inevitably raised questions about the mechanics of international festival cinema itself. One suspects that Farhadi’s reputation as an Oscar-winning artist – combined with the scale of the French production behind the film – mattered far more to Cannes than the Polish context underpinning the project. Critical reactions remained sharply divided, with many reviewers unconvinced by the film’s attempt to reinterpret Kieślowski’s moral universe.

Yet the project acquired an entirely different emotional resonance once the screening ended.

Almost at the same time as the film ended came the news of Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s death – the co-writer of the Decalogue, one of the key architects of Kieślowski’s cinema and, poignantly, a co-producer of the new adaptation alongside Musiał. Suddenly, the film began to feel overshadowed by another narrative altogether: not one about reinterpretation, but about absence and closure.

Cinema often likes to imagine itself as prophecy or fate. But the timing of Piesiewicz’s death felt too cruel to romanticise. What remained instead was the unsettling sense of witnessing the end of a certain chapter in Polish cinema – not through grand gestures, but quietly, somewhere between one screening and the next.

The absent presence

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Director Pawel Pawlikowski poses after receiving the Best Director award for 'Fatherland' during the closing ceremony of the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 23 May 2026. The film festival runs from 12 to 23 May 2026, photo: Sebastien Nogier/EPA/PAP

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Despite Paweł Pawlikowski’s well-deserved Best Director win, this year’s Cannes left behind a strange sense of ambivalence surrounding Polish cinema’s international position.

On paper, Poland appeared unusually visible throughout the festival. There were Polish co-productions in competition, Polish actors in the side sections and a Polish short selected for the official programme. Yet the closer one looked, the more elusive that presence became.

Aside from Toczek’s Spiritus Sanctus, none of the major titles presented in Cannes could be described as distinctly Polish in language, setting or cultural texture. Poland functioned primarily as a co-producer, a financial partner or part of the production infrastructure rather than as the emotional or artistic centre of the films themselves.

Even those involved seemed aware of that ambiguity. Producer Ewa Puszczyńska repeatedly emphasised that Fatherland was fundamentally a Polish film despite its German setting, German protagonists and multilingual production context.

But what actually makes a film belong to a national cinema today?

Pawlikowski’s Fatherland may have been directed by one of Poland’s greatest living filmmakers, yet it tells the story of Thomas Mann and post-war Germany. Farhadi’s reinterpretation of the Decalogue returns to one of the foundational works of Polish cinema, but relocates Kieślowski’s moral universe to Paris, with a French cast and an Iranian director behind the camera. Poland remains present mostly as a point of origin – an idea rather than a cinematic reality.

None of this diminishes the artistic value of those films. Contemporary cinema is increasingly transnational, and co-productions have long shaped the European arthouse landscape. Yet Cannes – and many other festivals before – has exposed a broader problem: Poland currently lacks a recognisable new generation of filmmakers consistently entering the international festival circuit with films rooted in their own artistic identities.

The issue becomes even more visible beyond Cannes itself. While classic Polish cinema continues to circulate internationally through retrospectives and institutional programming, younger Polish directors rarely appear in the sidebars of major festivals, let alone in competition line-ups. For a country with one of Europe’s largest film industries and one of its richest cinematic traditions, that absence feels increasingly difficult to ignore.

This is not a question of talent. Poland has no shortage of compelling young filmmakers. The problem is visibility – and perhaps also confidence. Too often, contemporary Polish cinema feels shaped by aspiration rather than artistic risk, carefully following international festival trends instead of attempting to redefine them. The question is – who’s at fault? Filmmakers? Producers? Founders?

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'Man of Iron' receiving the Palme d'Or, 1981. Pictured: Sean Connery, Krystyna Zachwatowicz and Andrzej Wajda, Cannes Film Festival, 1981, photo: Jerzy Kośnik

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Wręczenie Złotej Palmy na Festiwalu Filmowym w Cannes za film "Człowiek z żelaza", 1981. Na zdjęciu: Sean Connery, Krystyna Zachwatowicz i Andrzej Wajda, 1981, fot. Jerzy Kośnik

What emerges are well-crafted films that frequently lack the singularity contemporary festivals now seek. Romanian cinema, by contrast, continues to command international attention precisely because of its uncompromising local specificity. There is an old joke, repeated by Polish critics, that Romanian filmmakers often reveal more truth about Poland than Polish directors themselves do. Beneath the irony lies a genuine frustration.

Meanwhile, Cannes increasingly operates through networks of institutional power and co-production alliances, with French cinema occupying a particularly dominant role. This year, nine films in the main competition were either French productions or French co-productions. In that context, international visibility often depends less on national identity than on access to the right production ecosystem.

Poland remains part of that ecosystem, but rarely at its centre. Perhaps this is also the consequence of Poland’s shifting geopolitical position. International festivals frequently turn towards regions marked by visible social or political rupture – places where cinema appears urgent in immediately recognisable ways. Poland no longer occupies that symbolic position. It is neither perceived as an emerging cinematic territory nor as a dominant cultural force capable of setting global trends.

And yet the absence remains striking. A country that once produced Andrzej Wajda, Kieślowski, Wojciech Jerzy Has, or Andrzej Żuławski should not disappear from the contemporary festival conversation so easily.

What Cannes revealed this year was therefore not a failure, but a contradiction. Polish cinema is present everywhere – in financing structures, co-productions, cinematography, acting talent and institutional partnerships – while simultaneously struggling to produce new auteur voices capable of reshaping the international conversation around cinema itself.

_{Written by Łukasz Mańkowski, May 2026}

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