![son of saul the movie son of saul the movie](https://images.moviesanywhere.com/8bc9981241e5ac67c80ee6f79fa272b0/38fd8bf1-9c45-4848-9048-67a9fa978422.jpg)
SON OF SAUL THE MOVIE MOVIE
This movie is not only about the ways in which the Nazis were very efficient at killing, but also at corrupting and controlling the morality of those they enlisted to help them kill. To have an intuition of what’s going on and sound was extremely important in designing this immersive experience for the viewer. So, we wanted to rely more on the imagination of the viewer. But there are sounds coming to you constantly. You only see very little, or know very little. It’s, I think, reflecting in a way the situation of the individual within the concentration camp. You cannot always identify the source of the sounds. The sound is like a living organism in this film.
![son of saul the movie son of saul the movie](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/vss_sonofsaul_tn.jpg)
It’s also made of layers of human voices. The sounds give a constant reference point of the infinity of the suffering, and the enormity of the machinery of extermination. The sounds are there to suggest that there is much more than the picture. Could you talk a little bit about how important sound was to the making of this film, and what sound gives the audience that the images don’t? That we hear, as an audience, a lot of what is happening around Saul, even if we don’t see it with our own eyes. But you also make a very specific choice to use sound almost as the narration for the story. One is to stay with Saul, played by Géza Röhrig, the entire film. There are two very important stylistic choices you make. And that’s why we’re, in the film, with the main character. We wanted to give a face to the Holocaust. We just wanted to immerse the viewer in the situation, with the main character. So, we didn’t try to describe the whole process of the Holocaust. It’s one day and a half in the life of an inmate in Auschwitz, who is a member of the Sonderkommando, the special squad that had to work in the crematorium to burn the bodies and get rid of the ashes. I’m curious why you said that and what that means to you. And you’ve said in your notes for this film, that this film does not tell the story of the Holocaust, but it really seems to. So, it’s very clear that the intention of the film is to not talk about the survivors, but about those who’ve died. I really wanted to find a way to imagine, and to feel, what it was like to be an individual in the midst of the Holocaust.Īnd as you and everyone else should know, two-thirds of all European Jews were killed during the Holocaust. And I wanted to talk about it because I had the feeling the so-called Holocaust films have established a paradigm of survival, and of distance - just reassuring the audiences. So that’s something that defined me from a very early age. I don’t have really a family because of Auschwitz, in a way. I have a big part of my family that was taken to Auschwitz to be killed. Read more of László Nemes's conversation with John Horn below, in which he discusses his motivations for making the film, the importance of sound design, and how he urged his actors to strive for a very subdued style of acting. But it is a fight for humanity, and for life, nonetheless. The boy he finds is already dead he may be Saul's son, and he may not be. Nemes's own extended family perished in Auschwitz, and he wanted to focus on the daily struggle for spiritual survival - whether the individual physically survived the experience or not. This is in contrast to Hollywood treatments of the Holocaust, which tend to take a wide scope of historical events and overwhelmingly focus on stories of those who made it out alive. Nemes also wanted to imagine the individual's daily experience in the camps.
![son of saul the movie son of saul the movie](http://wboc-digital.s3.amazonaws.com/production/sites/wboc/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/29143120/SON-OF-SAUL1.jpg)
I wanted to say that the moral responsibility will always lay with the perpetrators, never with the victims." "With this film I wanted to suggest that the camp prevents the individual from thinking. "Nobody knows what they had to go through," Nemes told The Frame. They were, after all, forced under threat of death to complete their work. Nemes says that in his film he wants to rehabilitate the Sonderkommando. They were better fed and more well-dressed, but they were also isolated from the other prisoners. In a sense, they received special treatment. Factions of male prisoners selected for their physical strength, the Sonderkommandos, or "Special Unit Squads," were forced to work in the crematoriums, burning the bodies of gas chamber victims and disposing of the ashes. Saul, played by Géza Röhrig, embarks on an impossible quest: to give the body of a boy a proper burial.ĭuring the immediate years after World War II, the Sonderkommandos were seen as traitors and Nazi collaborators by the Jewish community. In his debut picture, "Son of Saul," Hungarian director and screenwriter László Nemes tells the story of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz named Saul.