'Fatherland' tops 'La Bola Negra' with 11 European Film Awards nominations

Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" led the 39th European Film Awards nominations announced Saturday by the European Film Academy, earning 11 nominations. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's "La Bola Negra" followed with 10.

The academy unveiled nominees across 16 key categories before a live audience at the Pavlos Zannas Theatre in Thessaloniki, Greece, during the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

The leading films' directors have shared an award before. Pawlikowski, Calvo and Ambrossi divided the Cannes best director prize in May 2026, and they now compete for European Director against Cristian Mungiu for "Fjord," Sandra Wollner for "Everytime" and Andrey Zvyagintsev for "Minotaur."

Pawlikowski shot "Fatherland," his first film in eight years, in black and white. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller play writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they travel across Germany in 1949, from Frankfurt in West Germany to Weimar in East Germany.

Hüller has two European Actress nominations, one for "Fatherland" and another for "Rose." In Markus Schleinzer's "Rose," she portrays a 17th-century woman posing as a man.

Her fellow nominees are Penélope Cruz for "Bunker," Léa Seydoux for "Gentle Monster," Renate Reinsve for "Fjord" and Mathilde Arcel for "Woman Unknown."

Zischler competes for European Actor with Javier Bardem for "The Beloved," Andrew Scott for "Elsinore," Sebastian Stan for "Fjord" and Swann Arlaud for "A Man of His Time." In Simon Stone's "Elsinore," Scott plays Ian Charleson, a British actor dying of AIDS who dedicates himself to one last performance of "Hamlet."

"La Bola Negra" connects the lives of three gay men across 1932, 1937 and 2017. Following its Cannes world premiere, it won audience awards and performed strongly at the box office in Spain and internationally, Deadline reported.

Mungiu's "Fjord" ranked third with five nominations, while "Rose" took four.

"Fjord" brought Mungiu his second Cannes Palme d'Or in 2026, following his win for "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" in 2007. Reinsve and Stan play a Norwegian and Romanian couple whose hopes for a new life in a fjord village meet neighbors with a very different outlook, and Stan plays her fundamentalist Christian husband.

May el-Toukhy's Venice Golden Lion winner "Woman Unknown" received three nominations, according to Variety. Arcel won best actress at Venice for the film. "Bunker," "Coward," "Elsinore," "Everytime" and "Minotaur" received two nominations apiece.

Fifteen films compete for European Film

The European Film field includes five fiction features, "Fatherland," "La Bola Negra," "Fjord," "Woman Unknown" and first-time director Marine Atlan's French coming-of-age drama "La Gradiva." The category has 15 titles altogether because it also includes every nominee for European Documentary and European Animation Film.

Among the documentary contenders is Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's "NAZA," which The Hollywood Reporter described as an exposé of Israel's war in Gaza produced by The Guardian and Britain's JW Films. "NAZA" received the Special Jury Prize at Venice, while Pegah Ahangarani's "Rehearsals for a Revolution" won best documentary at Cannes.

The academy's 5,700 members chose the nominees and will now vote on the winners. The results will be announced Jan. 16, 2027, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens.

It will be the second ceremony in January after the academy moved the event from its longtime December slot to bring it into the wider awards season. The ceremony falls after Academy Awards nomination voting closes Jan. 15 and before Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 21, giving European Oscar contenders time to return to Europe.