![]() “We really wanted to exclude all the representation codes that were built up after the war, the scene logic to the way characters are addressed or behave, because they’re related to survival strategies,” says Nemes. ![]() But he is reluctant to align the film with Hollywood dramatisations such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which tend to be couched as sentimental narratives of good and evil and position a hero whose humanistic compass we can root for. Nemes professes respect for the astounding achievement of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, which stands as the definitive documentary bearing witness to the Holocaust, and says the team revisited its survivor testimonies along with consulting personal accounts in their research. As time passes and survivor numbers dwindle, the sense of urgency in passing historical memory on to subsequent generations only seems to be becoming stronger. The trio are quick to acknowledge that attempts to render the Holocaust on screen are already numerous. Of the eight languages heard in the film, Yiddish is dominant - a language that almost disappeared in the Holocaust along with its speakers. “The sound constantly reminds you as a viewer that there’s more.” The sonorities of speech as historical memory were also important. We’re looking at what he is interested in - he’s not paying attention to the horror because there was a sort of psychological distance he had to create.” While our point of view is restricted, sounds - from screams to gunshots and desperate whispers - never let up on their hellish implications. “The way we stick to him is a way to accompany him through the journey. “I wonder whether we should have given him less expensive shoes to save budget, because they were not needed,” jokes Nemes. We’re so close in, we never see his whole body. Shot in shallow focus and tracked through long takes, he fills almost every frame, his surroundings a chaos of blur and din. Powerfully nailing traumatised disconnect as Saul is first-time actor Geza Rohrig, who has penned two poetry collections on the Shoah. “He was my film school,” says Nemes, adding: “It’s a long Hungarian tradition. It was important for us to make a film for this generation to understand, rather than having all these years of projected explanations and sentimentality.” While he developed his own singular approach, Nemes’ work as an assistant director to Béla Tarr, Hungary’s cinematic master of formal rigour and philosophical weight, primed him well for such an undertaking. I don’t have a family really because they were wiped out. “Not even stories, but the constant frustration that something terrible happened in the family and we don’t understand how. Nemes’ drive to make the film came from his own personal relationship to the Holocaust: “I’ve been infused with the stories,” he says. It’s 1944 toward the end of the war, and there’s a frantic desperation to the pace that compounds the sickening sense-impression fever. Scrubbing down walls and floors, carrying bodies to the incinerators, and shovelling ashes: in each task Saul goes through the motions while blocking himself mentally from their enormity. There’s a lack of overt context as we first see him steering new arrivals into what they’re told are showers, but we soon grasp the act’s abject meaning. ![]() In panicked numbness he goes about his labour, navigating a sensory tumult of horrors as a cog in the industrialised killing machine. “Something had to be done to bring the viewer’s experience back to the level of one human being.” Son of Saul does just that, immersing us in the experience of Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner and Sonderkommando worker in the crematoriums at Nazi death camp Auschwitz. They try to show too much, and tell too much,” Nemes says. “I’ve been completely frustrated by other films on the Holocaust.
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