A writer comes home, and home has become a question he cannot answer. It is 1949. After sixteen years in exile, Thomas Mann travels through a ruined, divided Germany to receive the Goethe Prize. His daughter Erika, herself an actress and writer, drives their black Buick from American-controlled Frankfurt toward Soviet-controlled Weimar. Mann is being welcomed as a great German, but what does that welcome mean after everything that has happened? The road gives father and daughter time together, though time together does not always make conversation easier.Sandra Hüller makes Erika the film’s alert, formidable centre. Even as she listens, affection and impatience pass across her face, along with the effort of deciding what to say next. Hanns Zischler gives Mann the dignity of a public figure and the uncertainty of a man among ghosts. Łukasz Żal’s beautiful,  luminous, precise black-and-white photography understands that a face can hold as much history as a shattered building. The images are marvelous, but their beauty never obscures the devastation they depict.Fatherland brings to a close an informal trilogy begun with Ida and Cold War. In all three films, Pawlikowski sets intimate relationships against the upheavals of twentieth-century Europe. His gift is to let the two scales meet without forcing either into a lesson. This time the journey asks whether one can return to a country without returning to the person one was there. Erika, with her view of the present, will not allow the past to become a comfortable abstraction. Pawlikowski trusts an exchange or a stretch of silence to do the work of a speech. Father and daughter cross a country together; understanding it, and each other, will take longer.Teresa Cavina