Son of Saul (2015)
Directed by László Nemes
In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper Jewish burial.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced Son of Saul
What critics say influenced Son of Saul
Consider the number of titles that became either art-house staples or pop culture touchstones: Night and Fog (1955), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Shoah (1985), Au revoir les enfants (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997), etc.
It’s not as graphic as many – there are more cordwood-piled corpses in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful than are seen here – but Hungarian director László Nemes and actor Géza Röhrig, who plays the titular Saul and is in virtually every shot, employ a heart-shattering form of “you are there” filmic composition to put the audience dead center amidst the horrific, workaday world.
Nevertheless, it is far from Oscar-winning crowd-pleasers like Schindler’s List or Life Is Beautiful.
There's some ambiguity over whether the boy is Saul's illegitimate son, but the smallness of this gesture serves as a powerful rebuke to the martyrs and saints that populate Holocaust narratives like Schindler's List or Life Is Beautiful.
From “Schindler’s List” to “The Pianist” to “Inglorious Basterds,” the Third Reich’s meticulous planning of mass extinction in Europe has inspired countless filmmakers to create genocide narratives.
It’s impossible to be a lover of cinema without having been down this road before in films like Schindler’s List and The Pianist.
The Foreign Language Film category is practically a breeding ground for the genre—there’s a clear line back from last year’s champion in the category, Ida, to Poland’s 2011 nominee In Darkness, to Austria’s The Counterfeiters (winner, 2007), to Sophie Scholl–The Final Days (2005), Downfall (2004), Twin Sisters and Želary (2003), Nowhere in Africa (winner, 2002), on and on and on.