A London hotel suite contains a decorative Hindu swastika above a director’s head during conversation about his Holocaust-related film Orphan. The director notices it immediately and takes it as a humorous moment, while also recalling being placed in a film festival room associated with Mel Gibson. His earlier film Son of Saul, released in 2015, follows a Sonderkommando forced to clear Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and incinerate bodies. The film received major recognition, including an Oscar for best foreign language film. Orphan is presented as a personal attempt to address the director’s family’s dark past, and he describes choosing to maintain control rather than taking hired directing work.
"We've been talking for less than five minutes when I spot the swastika. It's just above the head of Laszlo Nemes, one of Europe's most acclaimed directors, as he sits in the suite of a London hotel, talking about Orphan, his intensely personal new film that dwells on among other things the impact of the Holocaust on the generations that followed. It's an ancient, Hindu swastika, part of a decorative wall-hanging but still. I'm halfway through a question when I notice it."
"Nemes laughs; of course, he'd seen it immediately. I wanted to point that out to you, he says. It is so funny. Before leaving this room, I will take pictures. Mind you, he's had worse. When I was at the San Sebastian film festival with Son of Saul, they put me in the Mel Gibson room. I don't think Son of Saul would make the Oscars shortlist today nobody would touch it with a 10ft pole Son of Saul was the film that launched Nemes."
"Released in 2015, it was his first feature as a director, an astonishing, unflinching study of a day and a half in the life of a Sonderkommando, one of the slave labourers of Auschwitz-Birkenau forced to perform the bleakest task imaginable: clearing the gas chambers of the corpses of their fellow Jews, depositing the bodies in ovens to be incinerated. Son of Saul dared to stare into the abyss of the Shoah and was swiftly recognised as among the greatest films about the Holocaust ever made."
"Naturally, he had offers: he could have been a gun for hire, he says but: I wanted to keep control. I wanted to be the director and not, you know, just someone who carries out the task I have a h"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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