Son Of Saul
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, this powerful and gripping Holocaust drama follows a concentration-camp inmate who goes to desperate lengths to secure a traditional Jewish burial for a young boy.
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the corpse of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.
A former assistant to Béla Tarr, László Nemes displays a masterful control of the medium. Placing the viewer in constant proximity to Saul, Nemes breaks new ground in the representation of the Holocaust and of the fortitude of the human spirit that endured it.