Germany launches its own Dogma movement at #Cannes2026
Tom Tykwer, Ilker Catak, Nora Fingscheidt, Helene Hegemann & Kurdwin Ayub will each make one Dogma film over the coming years.
FATHERLAND is a deceptively understated but precise film from Paweł Pawlikowski. So restrained in its storytelling that it never quite feels like it reaches its full emotional potential, yet there’s a quiet, lingering pain running through it that powerfully reflects the German psyche in the aftermath of WWII: wanting to mourn but feeling unable to, being told to move on but still feeling trapped by the weight of the past. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller deliver two beautifully restrained performances, while August Diehl leaves a lasting impression in a single scene, shot in one take. And as always, Łukasz Żal’s cinematography is absolutely stunning, especially in black-and-white. It might be my least favorite of Pawlikowski’s last three films, but it’s still an entrancing and heavy piece of work at only 82 minutes in length.
The Marxist critiques are valid, but I also think Wenders isn’t glorifying minimum wage labor so much as crafting a character study about a guy who has found happiness in solitude and his little rituals. The cleaning toilets part is just one aspect of this.
maybe this is idiosyncratic, but learning about Éric Rohmer's personal life—the fact that he was a devout Catholic, that he hid his filmmaking career from his mother, that he never cheated on his wife—really turned me off his films