The drama won the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where Claude Lanzmann, director of the iconic Holocaust documentary, “Shoah,” congratulated Nemes on his movie. Saul’s mission to bury the boy appears to be as much as a revolt, albeit an internal one, as his comrades’ rebellion against the Nazis.

Throughout the film, the camera often remains in close up on Saul’s face, or with the point of view limited to what he sees at his eye level, and atrocities appear only as blurred images on the periphery of the frame. Convinced that the child was his son, Saul embarks upon a feverish mission to find a rabbi to recite Kaddish and to properly bury the boy, even as his fellow Sonderkommando members are planning a rebellion against their captors.

Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes’ harrowing debut feature film, “Son of Saul,” spotlights a day-and-a-half in the life in 1944 of a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau – Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) is a Hungarian Jewish prisoner, one of those forced to help usher Jews into the gas chambers, then to remove the corpses and burn them in the crematoria ovens, all with the knowledge that the Nazis would purge the likes of him and his colleagues every few months.Īs the film opens, Saul is portrayed as an emotional zombie, inured to the horrors of his gruesome environment until he discovers a boy who miraculously survived the gas chamber, only to be murdered by a Nazi doctor minutes later.

Son of saul film