At Cannes, the jury feted his achievement, awarding “Son of Saul” the Grand Prix. Politics close in around a wealthy Jewish family enjoying the good life.Ī father tries to convince his young son they’re not in a death camp film also won an actor Oscar for director-star Roberto Benigni.Ī Jewish counterfeiter is forced to help the Nazis make fake British currency.Ī teen about to become a nun faces the truth about her past in this spare road movie.Īpart from that initially skeptical wave, the tide has largely turned in Nemes’ favor.

New York Times critic Manohla Dargis lambasted it as “radically dehistoricized, intellectually repellent,” suggesting that the white-knuckle obsession that drives Saul - putting his desire to bury a boy he imagines to be his son ahead of his own survival - minimizes the suffering of actual prisoners.įive feature films about Holocaust victims and survivors have won the foreign-language OscarĪ Slovak merchant faces a moral dilemma when asked to take over the shop of a Jewish widow. Berlinale programmers passed on the film, and when it premiered a few months later in official competition at Cannes, several prominent French pundits took a stand against the movie. Not everyone is on board with Nemes’ approach. “What I wanted to do was to make a film that captures how it felt to be inside the camp on a visceral level.”

You can feel a certain postwar separation you’re not really there,” Nemes explains. “What disturbs me most in Holocaust films is that the events are always seen from a distance in space and time. Ultimately, he raised nearly the entire $1.6 million budget via the Hungarian Film Fund, with additional support from the Claims Conference, which represents Jews seeking restitution for Nazi crimes. Wanted to talk about the rule, which is death,” says Nemes, who refused to soften his approach, even after backers in France, Israel, Germany and Austria turned him down. Whereas other films tend to focus on the exception, “I

Of the roughly 9 million Jews living in Europe before the Holocaust, historians estimate that only a third survived. These were not survivor stories, like those that have served as the basis of so many other Holocaust movies, but accounts made by Jewish prisoners unsure of their fates, desperate to convey their awful reality to an unsuspecting outside world. The 38-year-old Nemes, who lost much of his family to the Holocaust, was originally inspired by written testimonies recovered from Auschwitz.

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