In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann returns to Germany after sixteen years of American exile, accompanied on a fraught road trip by his daughter Erika, an actress, writer and rally driver in her own right. Travelling by black Buick from US-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-held Weimar, father and daughter confront a fatherland still reeling from war and largely unwilling to reckon with its own culpability, their journey shadowed throughout by the absence of Erika's brother Klaus, a depressive fellow writer whose troubled presence still casts a long shadow over the family. The third instalment in Pawlikowski's loose trilogy of historical dramas, following Ida and Cold War, the film won its director the Best Director prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. A visually ravishing, deceptively understated drama that finds real weight in restraint, Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler delivering beautifully controlled performances even where the film's muted approach occasionally stops short of its full emotional potential.