The film follows Mann, played by Hanns Zischler, and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a road trip through divided Germany in 1949, travelling from American-occupied Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar.
The screenplay was co-written by Pawlikowski and Henk Handloegten.
Shot in black and white, Fatherland is a European co-production filmed partly in Poland – in Legnica, Wałbrzych and Wrocław – as well as in Germany and the United States.
Pawlikowski worked with his regular collaborators, including cinematographer Łukasz Żal.
The prize is Pawlikowski's second best director award at Cannes; he won the same prize in 2018 for Cold War.
His earlier film Ida won the Academy Award for Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Polish film to do so.
The jury also awarded the best director prize jointly to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra.
The Palme d'Or went to Romanian director Cristian Mungiu for Fjord, a drama set in a small Norwegian village about tensions between a long-established local family and a religious migrant couple. Andrei Zvyagintsev's Minotaur received the Grand Prix.
The jury prize went to Valeska Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure.
The main competition jury was led by South Korean director Park Chan-wook and included actors Demi Moore, Ruth Negga and Stellan Skarsgård, among others.
(ał)
Source: PAP, IAR