László Nemes & Geza Rohrig, Son of Saul

A controversial Holocaust film since its Cannes premiere in May 2015, and László Nemes's directing debut, Son of Saul is set in late 1944 and follows, in extreme close-up, Geza Rohrig’s Saul, a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner and Sonderkommando* at Auschwitz. The film's plot charts Saul's desperate attempts to give a murdered boy – who may or may not be his son – a proper Jewish burial. Nemes, a NYU Film School veteran, cast the New York poet Rohrig in Rohrig's first ever film --an incredible entrée into acting, in a role for which he is on camera for every second of the story. Son of Saul is Hungary’s entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

*Work units made up of Nazi extermination camp prisoners who were forced, on threat of death, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.

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