NYFF Live: László Nemes & Géza Röhrig (‘Son of Saul’)

The most talked about, and controversial, movie at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was also the debut feature of a major new director. Son of Saul takes a brutal look inside a World War II concentration camp and offers an unflinching look at the life of one man, played by Géza Röhrig, who is trying to survive and also bury a boy that he believes is his son. Harrowing and exquisitely made, Son of Saul was shot on film and directed by a protégé of the great Béla Tarr, the Hungarian László Nemes, who worked on Tarr’s 2007 film The Man from London (NYFF45). “I might be part of a dying kind,” Nemes said at Cannes this year. “This is the soul of cinema, the physical image projected. Everything else is a screen.”