The Oscar nominations were announced Thursday morning and Son of Saul, to the surprise of likely no one, is a finalist for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture. Over the weekend, Son of Saul, a film set at Auschwitz in which actors speak a mixture of Yiddish, Hungarian, and German, won the Golden Globe for a foreign language film at Sunday’s award ceremony. Directed by László Nemes and starring Géza Röhrig, a former kindergarten teacher, Son of Saul also won the Grand Prix (runner up to the Palme d’Or) and International Federation of Film Critic’s Fipresci prizes at Cannes in May.
But enough about awards. If you’ve still not seen the film, consider reading some of Tablet’s coverage for a primer. In his review, J. Hoberman sum up the “visceral and haunting” Son of Saul—a movie about Röhrig’s Saul Ausländer, an inmate and member of the Sonderkommando tasked with “clean[ing] out the gas chamber, reliev[ing] the dead of their gold fillings, shovel[ing] the bodies into the crematoria, and dispos[ing] of their ashes”—thus: “[It’s] a film about the aftermath of a miracle and then a series of miracles that, in its brutal tact, compassion, and intelligence, is something of a miracle itself.”
And here’s Röhrig in conversation with Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry in December:
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Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
