The director of “Son of Saul”, the Holocaust movie that won the Oscar award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016, said this week that the movie would’ve been ignored in today’s “shameless orgy of antisemitism.”
“I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today,” László Nemes told Jonathan Freedland in an interview at Cannes published on Monday in The Guardian,
Asked why, Nemes said: “Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered... Nobody would touch it with a 10ft pole.”
“Son of Saul” follows a few days in the life of a Hungarian Jew whom the Nazis forced to operate the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Nemes’s latest film, “Orphan,” focuses on a Hungarian-Jewish teenager who lived through World War II and the 1956 anti-communist uprising, which the Soviet Union crushed. The boy’s relationship with a paternal figure in his life exposes the duress his mother had endured during the Holocaust while he had been hidden in an orphanage.
Nemes called the new movie his “best work so far” but said he hadn’t found a U.S. distributor—in his opinion because it’s about Jews. His film was “ignored in Venice” and “even some response from the media smells of an ideological standpoint,” Nemes told Freedland.
Nemes has directed another movie, his third feature film, “Moulin,” about the resistance leader Jean Moulin. It was selected for the Cannes festival. Moulin was a Catholic.
“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the west,” Nemes told Freedland, whose newspaper, The Guardian, has been accused of promoting antisemitism in the guise of criticism of Israel.
Nemes condemned the “race obsession” and a “puritan, moralizing, self-righteousness” of the far left, particularly in the context of artists who single out Israel for a cultural boycott.
“I think it’s all anti-humanist regression,” Nemes said of the boycott campaign against Israel. “And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading. And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism... The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party,” Nemes added.
