Having a film selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival is quite an achievement. Having your first film selected is even more so.
“Son of Saul” by Hungarian director László Nemes has been very well received at the festival, becoming a front runner for a big prize.
The film is a violent, disturbing account of a little-known chapter of events in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A Hungarian Jew has been selected as a Sonderkommando, a group of trusted prisoners, who in return for tiny extra food rations, were forced to carry corpses out of the gas chambers, burn them and dispose of the ashes.
The film is harrowing and visually depressing, as director László Nemes intended: “We didn’t want to make a pretty film, we turned away from any classic aesthetic approach. You won’t find attractive compositions in this film, we refused to do that. This film isn’t iconographic, you can’t take stills from it. The dynamic is the important thing in the film, it’s essential not to fall in to the sentimen
