Nadia Tereszkiewicz on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Postwar Trilogy

The César award winning actor, soon to appear in the new series of The White Lotus, talks to AnOther about the effect of Paweł Pawlikowski’s films Ida, Cold War and Fatherland

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“I say trilogy, but Paweł Pawlikowski’s films Ida, Cold War and Fatherland are not linked directly so much as they are symbolically. Set in post-Second World War Europe at different moments in history, each looks at memory and identity, faith and inner conflict. Ida is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen – every shot is like a religious painting. There’s something about the path of this girl who tries to find her origins in communist Poland that resonated with me, but it’s bigger than that. The film addresses the Polish soul. My grandfather came from Kraków, so maybe that plays a part. Having rewatched it, now older and involved with cinema myself, I realise how symbolically strong the mise en scène is. Ida often appears small, surrounded by space, as though there’s some- thing almost godly present. In Cold War, the lead character, played by Joanna Kulig, who also sang in Ida, escapes Poland for Paris and you follow this love story shaped by political realities. Music is important in all three films. Pawlikowski’s most recent, Fatherland, which I saw at Cannes, features a lot of music by Bach. It follows Thomas Mann – I loved his book The Magic Mountain – as he returns from the US to a Germany he no longer recognises after the war. Mann’s daughter, Erika, is played by Sandra Hüller, whose force is truly outstanding. There’s something unspoken and impossible to explain about Pawlikowski’s cinema, something overwhelming that I really admire.”

Nadia Tereszkiewicz trained as a professional ballerina for 15 years, dancing up to eight hours a day, until she quit after an injury at the age of 19. “I felt like I had failed, like my life was over,” says the French-Finnish actor. Compelled to pur- sue other passions, she moved to Paris from southern France to study literature at the Sorbonne. On the side, Tereszkiewicz started studying theatre too and auditioned to dance in films as a way of funding her new life in the French capital. Those parts morphed into acting ones. “It was my two loves together – words and dancing. Story and body.” Ballet taught her to control her body and how to occupy space, music and the stage, but accidents and imperfections were unwelcome. “If you fall in dance, you pretend it didn’t happen. If you fall in cinema, you lean into it. It was like they said, ‘We’ll take the faults.’ My body became the body of a woman with which I could tell stories without shame.” Now 30, Tereszkiewicz has appeared in dramas including Stéphanie Di Giusto’s Rosalie, François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Forever Young, for which she won a César. She’ll soon star in the fourth series of The White Lotus: “I dis- cover a piece of myself in every part I play.”

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally now. Order here