Watch The Trailer For SON OF SAUL

Sony Pictures Classics has released the US trailer and poster for SON OF SAUL, opening in NY & LA on December 18th, followed by more theaters.

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination.

While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son.

As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

Director László Nemes’ film is Hungary’s official selection for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

His first feature, Nemes spent the last five years bringing this project to fruition.

Director László Nemes and Géza Röhrig
Photo by Ildi Hermann, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

When asked where he came up with the idea for the film, the director said:

“When we were making A londoni férfi (The Man from London), in Bastia, the shoot was interrupted for a week and in a bookstore I found a book of eyewitness accounts published by the Shoah Memorial called Des Voix sous la cendre (Voices from beneath the Ashes), also known as “The scrolls of Auschwitz.” It’s a book of texts written by former Sonderkommando members from the extermination camps, who had buried and hidden their written testimonies before the rebellion in 1944. The actual documents were found years later. They describe their daily tasks, how the work was organized, the rules by which the camp was run and Jews exterminated, as well as how they put together a certain form of resistance.”

SON OF SAUL was the 2015 Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix winner.