Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is set to open the 32^nd Sarajevo Film Festival and the Polish helmer is set to personally welcome audiences at the gala screening on August 14. 

The film, which rounds up Pawlikowski’s Cold War trilogy, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year where it won the Best Director award. 

Fatherland centers on the relationship between Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), an actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, father and daughter embark on a challenging emotional road trip in a black Buick taking them across a Germany in ruins – from U.S. dominated Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar. 

Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the U.S., Thomas has to face not only a divided fatherland, but a deep fracture within his own family. 

“It seems like the film suits Sarajevo Film Festival because it is steeped in history and in conflict, in situations which are still within living memory in Bosnia,” said Pawlikowski. “It feels like a good context to show the film. And I have a relationship with the Sarajevo Film Festival that stretches back for decades.” 

Pawlikowski’s 1992 documentary film Serbian Epics was screened in the early days of the Sarajevo Film Festival. His feature Cold War opened the 24^th Sarajevo Film Festival. The following year, in 2019, Pawlikowski was honored with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, alongside a retrospective of his work presented within the Tribute To program. 

“This is a festival that I feel very close to,” he said. “I value the relationships I formed in Sarajevo with Miro, with Jovan. It is a kind of real relationship with people who are film lovers, but also have a sense of history. My films, especially the last three, which are steeped in history, have a very good home there. I’m happy to be back and very thrilled that it is opening the festival.” 

Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, the first Polish film to do so. It also won five European Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenwriter. 

The 32st Sarajevo Film Festival takes place August 14-21, 2026. 

How many Oscar-nominated Hollywood stars can you name who have donated one of their kidneys to a complete stranger? As of now, the list probably just comprises Jesse Eisenberg, the awkward leading man in David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network turned Oscar-feted writer-director of the 2024 Holocaust-themed road trip A Real Pain. Eisenberg recently dropped into the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, ostensibly to collect the event’s President’s Award but more likely to take a breather before his new film takes him back onto the promotional circuit: Called The Debut, it stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti and takes place in the world of summer-stock theater.

“The movie takes place in 1990 in New Jersey,” he explained, “which is the time I started getting into theater. I loved it and I was terrified by it — it was the only place I felt comfortable and the place where I felt the most fear. I loved it so much and it was the only time I really felt comfortable in my own skin, but also I was terrified because there was an audience coming to see me.” There have been rumors that the film is musical, but Eisenberg was quick to clarify. “No,” he said, “the movie is not a musical in the sense that the characters break into song. The movie is about this woman who gets a part in a musical, and so you see her rehearse for it and her you see opening night. But no, it’s not a straightforward musical, which I think movie studio is happy about.”

Eisenberg confirmed that the part was written especially for Moore, after being particularly inspired by her work on his 2022 film When You Finish Saving The World. It was a risky strategy. “I was thinking, ‘If she doesn’t do this movie, it won’t get made, because she’s the only person on the planet who could do this thing.’ Which is a mistake as a writer. You don’t write for a movie star because chances are they’re busy, or don’t want to do it, and then you’re screwed. But with this, I was like, “I will only do this movie if Julianne says yes.” And I was so scared halfway through the script. I was telling my friend, ‘God, this is so awful, because only one person could do this part — and if she doesn’t like it, I’m screwed.’ So, it’s for her, but it’s also about my own experiences.”

Here, Eisenberg reflects on his career since the surprise awards life of A Real Pain…

DEADLINE: How was the success of A Real Pain for you? You don’t seem the kind of person who takes success very well…

EISENBERG: Yeah, it was strange. I spent six months doing publicity and just felt so embarrassed, like, “What did I say? Why am I talking about myself for six months?” You forget that you’re there for one reason, which is to sell a movie. Richard Ayoade, who’s my friend in England, he always says about press, “Our job is to just say the name of the movie and the date it comes out, yet we end up talking about ourselves for hours and it’s so unnatural.” He’s so smart. He says, “A lot of people get into the arts because they feel more comfortable expressing themselves through fiction — but then when you make a movie that’s popular, you end up talking about yourself way more.”

So, I spent six months talking about Poland every day. I know nothing about Poland. I spent six months talking about the Jewish experience. I know nothing about the Jewish experience. I’m an idiot. The only thing I know about is the characters in the movie and I know nothing else. And I would meet people — journalists — who knew way more about the situation than me and then they would ask me questions and then I would just walk away feeling so stupid that I spent so much time talking about a subject for which I know very little.

I got a bachelor’s degree from The New School [in New York] over the course of 18 years. It took me 18 years to get a bachelor’s degree and suddenly I’m on panels with PhDs talking about Polish history. I know nothing about it. The only thing I know is how to make funny characters talk to each other. And so, it’s highly inappropriate for me to talk about anything else, including now. I mean, I don’t know anything about the politics in America. I know about making jokes about musical theater because that’s my life. Why I’m in a position to talk about American politics is completely beyond me.

DEADLINE: The movie is inspired by your own family history [as victims of the Nazis]. Was it therapeutic for you?

EISENBERG: No, because I was celebrated for it! It did the exact opposite. I was trying to reconcile, like, how do I live more responsibly and humbly given my [family’s] past. And then people are like, “Here’s a tuxedo for free. Please come to this award show.” And suddenly you’re like, “No, no, no. This is the opposite. I was trying to humble myself.” The only good version of that movie is that everybody hates it and I’m miserable again and I’m living on the street and suddenly I have a taste of suffering. But no, it was the exact opposite. They were like, “You know that movie you made about your guilt for the Holocaust? Come talk to Conan about it!”

DEADLINE: Do you feel more comfortable as an artist these days?

EISENBERG: Yeah, I really feel like I’m in a lucky position. Could things change tomorrow? Sure. But like right now in New York, I know people who are being targeted, who are genuinely being targeted, who are living in homeless shelters and they have to leave when they think they’re going to be deported. [My wife and I] try to help them and find lawyers for them. It’s impossible to feel anything but very, very fortunate when you’re talking to people whose lives are being affected in an immediate way.

Meanwhile, I have friends who think of themselves as great victims and yet they are rich and they have power and security and they walk around like they are victims. I want to tell them, “There are real victims. There are victims now, not in a fantasy future. There are victims now, and we should be spending our times thinking about those people the way, when we were immediate victims, we wanted people to think about us.” And so that’s the way I think about it. I don’t think of myself as a victim in any way. I don’t think of myself as disadvantaged or put upon or worried about how people are going to view me, or are people going to be angry at me because of my heritage. It just doesn’t even cross my mind because there are people who are in more immediate need. How could you look at them and think, “They’re better off than me.”?

DEADLINE: Who do you mean?

EISENBERG: I don’t want to give too much away because it’ll put people in danger, but my wife works with a lot of people who are struggling because of immigration. They live in homeless shelters. Their lives are genuinely at risk; they often have to leave the homeless shelter because it’s going to be raided the next day, and then they have no place to go. Then they’re put at a homeless shelter far away, and they suddenly can’t go to school anymore because it’s so far away. I mean, these are real problems that are happening in the world and yet I have friends who are rich people who walk around thinking that they are suffering because some people don’t like them.

DEADLINE: Do you get inspiration from the showbiz side of things, or is it just a distraction from the work you want to do?

EISENBERG: The way I think about it is like this — my dad is a very smart person, and he told me, “If you have one or two experiences like that in your career, that’s a massive success. That is, you’re in the top 0.0001% of people in the arts if you get to go to the Academy Awards and sit anywhere in that building.” And so, the way I think about things is just through that perspective. Like, “This is crazy. I have no expectations to be here.” It’s a lot of luck and being in the right place and a million things out of my control and how your face looks and if it hits light in a way that makes you seeable on film. And so, I think like this is all just kind of very strange icing. I don’t expect anything like that.

Listen, I hate being in the public eye. I find it so embarrassing. I’m not an expert, but because I married a woman who really spends her life helping people, so I feel a little bit of responsibility. I donated a kidney this year and I thought like, “Well, maybe I should talk about that because maybe it could influence other people.” And I’d rather talk about that than talk about my ideas about movies. Maybe more people will donate their kidneys if they hear that.

DEADLINE: Who did you donate the kidney to?

EISENBERG:  It’s anonymous. There’s 90,000 people on the list.

DEADLINE: What spurred you to do that?

EISENBERG: Oh, just this feeling of responsibility. I feel like I’ve been given so much in my life. Yeah, you can live without one kidney. Actually, I want to say — because this is actually an important thing to say, which has nothing to do with the movie industry — that people who donate their kidneys tend to live longer than their non-donor peers, because you go through such a battery of tests to qualify that it ends up just being very healthy people who donate. So, for me to donate, actually, means I have a perfectly healthy life. It was very easy.

DEADLINE: And how do you feel now?

EISENBERG: I feel great. I feel 100%, 101% because I have a little pep in my step and I’m a little lighter.

DEADLINE: But you don’t know who has it?

EISENBERG: I don’t know. I’m sure they could figure it out because, well, I donated it and then did press for it. I donated on, I think, the last day of 2025. So maybe they would figure it out or something, but the tragedy is there’s 90,000 people out there, and so you donate one, but there’s still 89,999 people who are still dying. But beyond doing that, I don’t think I have any reason to speak about things in the public. I don’t have anything to offer. I prefer to think, “Well, what is our responsibility as somebody in the public eye?” I think we have a responsibility to try to put forth something positive, otherwise you’re just talking about your acting process for years. And who cares?