László Nemes, the Hungarian director whose harrowing Holocaust film Son of Saul secured the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2015, has grown more vocal about what he perceives as a concerning rise of antisemitism throughout Western nations. Speaking in London ahead of the release of his latest feature Orphan—only his second film in eleven years—the respected 49-year-old filmmaker voiced his worries about global prejudice and criticised what he describes as Hollywood’s hypocrisy on the matter. The film, which examines the long-term consequences of the Holocaust on future generations through the story of a Jewish boy concealed throughout the Second World War period, comes as Nemes prepares to debut another film Moulin, a biographical portrait of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin, at the Cannes Film Festival.
The challenge of bearing witness
Nemes’s focus on Holocaust memory and its intergenerational legacy is profoundly intimate. His family’s own experiences during the Second World War influence every frame of his work, lending his films an genuine emotional resonance that cannot be fabricated. Rather than exploiting the Holocaust for narrative impact, as he suggests some filmmakers do, Nemes handles the subject matter with the weight it requires. This dedication to uncompromising honesty has become his creative hallmark, setting him apart from peers who might have chased commercial success or critical acclaim through established methods.
Yet documenting such darkness exacts a emotional burden. Nemes has spoken candidly about the mental strain of making cinema centred on humanity’s propensity towards organised brutality. He declines to soften or romanticise the historical facts, believing instead that cinema has a moral obligation to confront viewers with harsh facts. This uncompromising approach has brought him critical acclaim and numerous accolades, but it has also required declining lucrative opportunities to direct blockbuster films or studio projects that would necessitate compromise his creative vision.
- Son of Saul illustrated a Sonderkommando’s anguishing final days at Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Orphan investigates Holocaust trauma’s impact on later generations through personal narrative
- Nemes prioritises artistic integrity above commercial considerations and market demands
- His films call for emotional and intellectual participation from audiences
Spanning Auschwitz to today
When László Nemes released Son of Saul in 2015, he could scarcely have anticipated the profound effect his debut feature would have on cinema. The film’s unflinching depiction of a Sonderkommando’s last moments at Auschwitz-Birkenau transcended the boundaries of Holocaust cinema, establishing itself as one of the most significant works ever made about our darkest period. Yet rather than rest on these laurels, Nemes has devoted subsequent years grappling with the deep inquiries his debut raised: how does trauma echo through generations? What does it mean to endure when so many did not? These concerns animate Orphan, his next film, which moves away from the immediate horrors of the Holocaust to its enduring emotional aftermath.
The trajectory from Son of Saul to Orphan reveals an artist in constant dialogue with history and memory. Where his debut examined a single, apocalyptic moment, his new film traces the contours of survival itself—the complicated, often painful process of living in the shadow of catastrophe. Nemes refuses the comfort of neat resolutions, instead presenting viewers with the murky ambiguities of post-war existence. His protagonist, Andor, navigates Hungary’s turbulent twentieth century bearing the invisible scars of hidden childhood, searching for answers about his mother’s fate whilst grappling with questions of identity and belonging that have no easy answers.
A movie that altered the landscape
Son of Saul came at a moment when Holocaust cinema seemed exhausted, its familiar narratives and conventional approaches having hardened into formula. Nemes’s film shattered this complacency with its radical formal choices and serious moral intent. By confining the lens to the protagonist’s immediate vicinity, frequently leaving the wider horrors of Auschwitz outside the frame, Nemes constructed a cinema of claustrophobia and constraint that reflected the psychological imprisonment of his subject. The film’s recognition—resulting in the Oscar for best foreign language film—confirmed his unwavering creative vision and positioned him as a major directorial voice.
Yet success brought unforeseen complications. The acclaim surrounding Son of Saul transformed Nemes into a prominent voice on matters of Holocaust memory and historical truth. Studios came calling with substantial offers; he could have become a “gun for hire” directing high-profile films. Instead, Nemes made a conscious decision to preserve his artistic autonomy, turning down work that would have required artistic compromise. This decision meant a decade-long gap before Orphan, but it ensured that when he returned to filmmaking, he did so completely according to his own vision.
Personal background, universal principles
Nemes has been open about the autobiographical dimensions of Orphan. His own family background is intertwined with the Holocaust and its aftermath; his parents were Hungarian Jews who endured the conflict, and the film emerges from a lifelong reckoning with inherited trauma and unanswered questions. Yet what makes the work extend beyond the merely personal is Nemes’s resistance to treating his family story as singular or exceptional. Instead, he locates it in the broader historical currents of twentieth-century Europe—the wars, occupations, and ideological convulsions that transformed an entire continent. The result is a film that resonates with anyone whose family has been fractured by history, whose past remains shadowed by violence and loss.
This universalising drive sets apart Nemes’s method from more traditional biographical cinema. Rather than crafting a linear story of survival and triumph, he adopts uncertainty and fragmentation as structural and conceptual devices. The mysteries surrounding Andor’s mother are never fully resolved; the film resists the redemptive arc that audiences might expect. Instead, Nemes insists on the untidy, indeterminate quality of historical truth, the way suffering endures across generations not as a solved problem but as an ongoing condition. This creative integrity—this refusal to provide simple solutions—marks Orphan as a work of genuine moral seriousness.
Orphaned and passed-down trauma
The main figure of Orphan, Andor, represents the particular psychological burden of hidden children—those Jewish children who made it through the Holocaust by being concealed in convents, orphanages, and private homes. Nemes explores the psychological confusion that surviving in such circumstances requires: Andor has been saved, yet at what expense? His childhood was stolen; his identity fractured between the name he was given in hiding and the familial sense of self he has almost no memory of. The film suggests that the act of survival becomes a form of haunting, a condition of endless displacement that resists healing through standard narrative endings or emotional resolution.
What makes Nemes’s handling notably sharp is his engagement with the crucial juncture in which Andor matures. The 1956 Hungarian uprising in opposition to Soviet rule forms the film’s timeframe. offering a parallel narrative of opposition and constraint. Andor’s personal quest for answers about his mother unfolds against this broader historical upheaval, indicating that individual trauma cannot be divorced from shared historical events. The film declines to privilege one narrative over the other, instead weaving them together to create a complex portrait of a male protagonist shaped by forces—both private and public—predominantly outside of his grasp.
The resurgence of prejudice and virtue signalling
Nemes speaks with palpable frustration about what he perceives as a return of antisemitism across the Western world. “An orgy of antisemitism is overtaking the west,” he declares, his words carrying the weight of authentic worry rather than hyperbole. He observes that this phenomenon exists alongside what he calls the industry’s selective moral outrage—an industry that readily positions itself as the guardian of progressive values whilst simultaneously remaining silent on certain inconvenient realities. The contradiction, he suggests, is not merely hypocritical but dangerous, allowing prejudice to flourish under the cover of institutional respectability.
What particularly galls Nemes is the pressure exerted on him to publicly align himself with various causes and petitions. “They ask if I’ve signed this or that petition,” he explains, suggesting that the film sector’s “overclass” has established itself as arbiter of acceptable opinion. This call for performative activism, he argues, serves primarily to absolve the askers of genuine responsibility. It converts moral commitment into a box-ticking exercise, a way for the powerful to signal virtue without engaging in any substantive action. For a director who has spent his career wrestling with dark history, such surface-level behaviour represents a profound betrayal of art’s genuine purpose.
- Nemes rejects instruction by Hollywood’s elite on questions of morality
- The cinema sector’s curated engagement masks underlying systemic dishonesty and neglect
- Antisemitism’s return demands serious artistic and moral engagement, not performative measures
- The culture of petition campaigns reduces intricate moral and historical questions to hollow spectacle
- Artistic integrity requires autonomy from institutional coercion and manufactured consensus
Hollywood’s selective conscience
The Hungarian director is unsparing in his critique of how the American film industry conducts itself. Those who populate the upper echelons of Hollywood, he suggests, are swift to denounce certain prejudices whilst staying notably quiet on others. This selectivity is not accidental; it reflects the industry’s own economic and political interests. Nemes has noted that moral pronouncements from studio heads and awards organisations often align questionably with what is financially or diplomatically advantageous. The result is a terrain where activism blurs into marketing, and conscience turns into merely another product to be packaged and sold.
What bothers Nemes most is the suggestion that such theatrical displays somehow absolve the industry of responsibility for fundamental systemic issues. By supporting declarations and publishing declarations, Hollywood can assert ethical superiority whilst proceeding unchanged. For an artist like Nemes, whose works require unflinching engagement with historical trauma and ethical nuance, this shallow approach is more than just inadequate—it is repugnant. True creative authenticity, he insists, cannot be reconciled with the compromises and hypocrisies that characterise the contemporary film industry’s connection to authority.
Creative boldness during a time of conformity
For Nemes, the central challenge confronting current artists is the expectation to align with dominant orthodoxies whilst preserving the facade of independence. The industry’s “overclass,” as he calls it, has created an tacit code of approved positions and approved causes. Departure from this agreement invites swift condemnation, yet compliance with it requires forfeiting true creative autonomy. Nemes has encountered this dynamic firsthand: the ongoing questions about which petitions he has signed, which pronouncements he has made, which sanctioned positions he has supported. These inquiries demonstrate a disturbing presumption—that an artist’s credibility is measured not by the depth and integrity of their work, but by their preparedness to demonstrate allegiance to trendy causes.
What distinguishes Nemes’s approach is his refusal to take part in this theatre of conformity. His films emerge from deep personal engagement with history, trauma and ethical complexity—not from a desire to satisfy the expectations of industry gatekeepers or satisfy contemporary pieties. This stance requires substantial courage, particularly for a director whose subject matter inevitably attracts examination from those eager to claim ethical authority over Holocaust narratives. Yet Nemes remains unmoved by such pressure, insisting that genuine artistic integrity demands independence from the machinery of consensus-building that defines modern cultural establishments.