KFC Presents: Fatherland (TBC)
This film is presented by Keswick Film Club as part of its 2026-2027 season. Everyone is welcome, but Membership of the Keswick Film Club costs £10 and then entitles you to a £3 discount on the ticket price of its films (which are shown on most Sundays from September to March, typically at 5pm).
As it is hosted by the Keswick Film Club, which is seperate from the cinema, this film is not included in the Keswick Alhambra Cinema Membership programme. If you are a Keswick Alhambra Cinema Member you can though also join the Keswick Film Club, and at the discounted price of just £5. Just ask the staff in the cinema if you would like to take up this offer.
Fatherland (in German, French and English with English subtitles)
Pawel Pawlikowski, who brought us the magnificent ‘Ida’ and ‘Cold War’, continues his Post-Second-World-War voyage with a docudrama based on a trip Nobel-prize winning author Thomas Mann made back to his home country in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize. ‘
As with its predecessors, the characters here go through the ringers of personal crises, with extra rolling pressure applied by the politics of the times. In ‘Fatherland’'s case, Mann finds himself compelled to confront his failings as a parent and also make an invidious choice between the ideologies of “Mickey Mouse or Stalin” when the lofty rhetoric of high art can no longer offer ivory-tower sanctuary’ - Leslie Felperin, Hollywood reporter.
He journeys round the ruined country, West and East, with his daughter, Erica - herself a writer and actor and war correspondent - ‘making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949’ and giving Pawel Pawlikowski time to talk about ‘idealism and its delusions; familial relationships; the nature of nationality and home; the Cold War race to capitalise on cultural heritage; the once-untouchable status assigned to eminent male artists’ - Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily.
Now living in the USA, which side is Mann on? Has he betrayed his fatherland? Is he now a communist sympathiser?
The whole is beautifully acted by Hans Zischler and Sandra Huller, and cinematographed by Lukasz Pal - giving us another masterpiece..?
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