Son of Saul

Both of tonight's films are about footage that gets cut — one that must be kept, one that must be destroyed.

In Son of Saul the Sonderkommando risk their lives to get hold of a camera and photograph the burning pits, because an image is evidence. In Cinema Paradiso the village priest vets every screening and orders every kiss and embrace removed; the projectionist keeps the cut frames in a pile on the projection-room floor and splices them back in before the print travels to the next town.

One insists on being seen; the other forbids it. And the two films answer in opposite ways: Son of Saul narrows the frame until you can see only the back of one man's head, pushing the atrocity out of focus and into sound; Cinema Paradiso opens the whole screen and lets a Sicilian town's entire appetite crowd into one hall.

1944 年 10 月，奥斯维辛-比克瑙。索尔·奥斯兰德是匈牙利犹太人，在特遣队服役——那是营里最残酷的岗位：把毒气室里的人送进焚尸炉，再清理现场。他做得熟练、麻木、不发一言。

某一天，他在死者中间看见一个还在呼吸的男孩。营里的医生随后结束了他的呼吸，并吩咐解剖。

从那一刻起，索尔开始做一件在这个地方毫无意义的事：他要找到一个拉比，要为这个孩子办一场合乎教规的葬礼。为此他必须在这个营里走动、交换、撒谎、冒犯所有人。

镜头从头到尾跟着他。你几乎看不见别的。

László Nemes's feature debut premiered in competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2015 and won the Grand Prix. It went on to take Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards — only the second Hungarian film to do so, after István Szabó's Mephisto in 1981 — and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, a first for Hungary.

The form is the argument. Shot on 35mm with a single 40mm lens in the 1.375:1 Academy ratio, the film keeps its background permanently out of focus: you see Saul's face and shoulder, and nothing else — including the atrocity. It runs 85 shots, none of them establishing.

Sound carries what the image refuses. Post-production took five months of sound design; voices in eight languages were recorded and layered over the production track. Sound designer Tamás Zányi described it as 'a kind of acoustic counterpoint to the intentionally narrowed imagery.'

Rotten Tomatoes records 96% positive from 233 reviews, averaging 8.9/10; Metacritic's weighted score is 91. The budget was €1.5 million — potential partners in France, Israel, Germany and Austria all turned the project down, and it was ultimately financed by the Hungarian National Film Fund (70%), Hungarian tax credits (25%) and the Claims Conference (5%).