The film’s script was prepared by the author in cooperation with the French writer Clara Royer during the five months he spent in Paris starting from March 2011 on a scholarship. And all the time, the Sonderkommando are aware, through this network of whispers, that they themselves will be executed in due course by their Nazi captors”, critic Peter Bradshaw wrote in praise of the extraordinary debut film in The Guardian, describing the movie as “outstanding, excoriating and astonishing”. Saul’s desperate mission is carried out with the same urgent, hoarse whispers and mutterings as another plot in progress: a planned uprising, which Saul’s intentions may upset. Among the dead, Saul discovers the body of his young son, and sets out to find a rabbi among the prisoners to give the boy a proper burial in secret, using pleas, threats, blackmail and bribes – with jewellery (called the “shiny”) that he steals from the bodies – to achieve his aim. The task is carried out at a frantic, ever-accelerating rate around the clock, as the Allies close in.

“Son of Saul is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944, and one Hungarian Jewish prisoner named Saul (played by Géza Röhrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners given humiliating and illusory privileges as trusties, with minor increases in food ration in return for their carrying the bodies from the gas chambers to pyres to be burned, then carting the ashes away to be dumped.

It has also won the FIPRESCI Prize in the main competition section, the François Chalais Prize and the Vulcan Award, among numerous other international recognitions. 39-year-old Hungarian director László Nemes’s movie, which offers unflinching depictions of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, claimed the runner-up Grand Prize at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in May. “Son of Saul,” which tells the story of a Jewish concentration camp inmate forced to help cremate his fellow prisoners, wrote history as it became the first Hungarian film to won the Golden Globe on Sunday for best foreign language film. The announcement was made early Thursday morning in a ceremony in Los Angeles. Hungarian Holocaust drama “Son of Saul” has been nominated for the best foreign film Academy Award.

Son of saul trailer