Son of Saul

Director: László Nemes

2015 / 107min / 35mm

Nemes, a former apprentice to Béla Tarr, made one of the most praised and debated feature debuts of the last decade with Son of Saul, the story of a Hungarian Jew serving in the Sonderkommando—concentration camp inmates forced to do the grunt labor of mass extermination—at Auschwitz-Birkenau. By closely trailing his protagonist with the camera and maintaining a fixed, shallow focus point-of-view, Nemes creates an impressionistic portrayal of life in the camps unlike any in cinema, in which the horrors we imagine out of frame are more terrible than anything that might be explicitly shown.