Son of Saul

[projekktor id=’22496′]

Son of Saul is a Hungarian drama written and directed by László Nemes. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it won three prizes including the Grand Prix du Jury award. It will also be Hungary’s submission for the Best Foreign Film award at the upcoming Academy Awards.

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

“Son of Saul is an ambitious film carried out in an economical manner,” explains Nemes, “plunging its viewer directly into the heart of a concentration camp. Our aim was to take an entirely different path from the usual approach of historical dramas, their gigantic scope and multi-point of view narration. This film does not tell the story of the Holocaust, but the simple story of one man caught in a dreadful situation, in a limited framework of space and time.”

Son of Saul is rated 14A.