László Nemes

László Nemes (born February 18, 1977, Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian director whose first feature film, the Holocaust drama Saul fia (2015; Son of Saul), won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Nemes’s father was a film director, and his mother was a teacher. In 1989 he moved with his mother to Paris. After attending the Paris Institute of Political Studies, where he studied history, international relations, and political science, he took classes in cinema at the Sorbonne. Nemes returned to Budapest in 2003. There he worked as an assistant to the distinguished director Béla Tarr on two projects: Tarr’s contribution to the short-film compendium Visions of Europe (2004), and A londoni férfi (2007; The Man from London). Nemes went on to direct a short film of his own: Türelem (2007; With a Little Patience), which was shown at the Venice International Film Festival. In 2006 he briefly sojourned in New York City, attending the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He directed two more shorts, The Counterpart (2008) and The Gentleman Takes His Leave (2010). In 2011 Nemes was awarded a place at the Cannes Cinéfondation Résidence du Festival, where he developed Son of Saul, his feature directing debut.

Set in October 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, Son of Saul follows the activities of a Sonderkommando (“special commando”), a Jewish prisoner forced to herd his coreligionists into gas chambers and dispose of their bodies in the notorious crematory ovens. The man, Saul Ausländer (played by Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig), spots a young boy who briefly survives after having been gassed. When the boy dies, Ausländer, convinced that the youth is his lost son, embarks upon a quest to give him a proper religious burial instead of loading his corpse into the ovens along with the thousands of others. In interviews, Nemes, who also wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Clara Royer, explained that his intention was to bring individual experience to the fore. A descendant of Holocaust victims himself, he felt that other depictions were too sweeping in their scale—and too uplifting in their ultimate message—to truly show the nightmare experienced by so many. Son of Saul received numerous awards, most notably an Oscar for best foreign-language film.

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Nemes next cowrote and directed Napszállta (2018; Sunset), which is set in 1913 Budapest, then a capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The drama centres on a young woman who was orphaned at age two. As she attempts to learn more about her family, including a long-lost brother, she also discovers an empire in decline.