Schlöndorff returns to Cannes with film on Germany’s turbulent past

Volker Schlöndorff came back to Cannes with the kind of historical burden that once made him one of European cinema’s defining voices. At 87, the German director presented Visitation, his 28th film, in the Cannes Première section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, a work built around Germany’s unsettled past and the long shadows it still casts.

The project reaches back to the territory that made Schlöndorff famous. The Tin Drum, which won the Palme d’Or in 1979 in a tie with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, later became the first German film after World War II to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. More than four decades later, Schlöndorff returned with another film that treats history not as background, but as the central subject of the drama.

Visitation, a free adaptation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Heimsuchung, is set around a house on a lake near Berlin, where three families live from the 1930s until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story moves across the Nazi era, division, and reunification, tracing how private lives are reshaped by the political ruptures of 20th-century Germany. Cannes describes the film as being rooted in that single place, but the setting carries a wider national memory: a Jewish family forced to sell its house, and an architect later blocked from building in East Berlin after being denied under the Nazis.

The film was shot last year on location in Brandenburg and at Studio Babelsberg, the historic production base that has long tied German filmmaking to its own industrial past. Jörg Bachmaier, chief executive of Studio Babelsberg, said the Cannes selection sent a positive signal to the German film industry, a reminder that older institutions can still find relevance when they are attached to ambitious work.

For Cannes, Schlöndorff’s return reinforced a central part of the festival’s identity. The event has always tried to balance reverence for auteurs with a search for new voices, and Visitation fit that model neatly: a veteran filmmaker revisiting national trauma for an audience that is younger, more global and less anchored to Europe’s postwar memory. At a moment when streaming, franchises and social media increasingly shape what reaches viewers, Cannes still rewards films that ask audiences to sit with history rather than escape it.

Schlöndorff’s presence on the Croisette was not just a tribute to a revered career. It was proof that European cinema still sees value in returning to old wounds, and that Cannes still sees an audience for the conversation.