The moment when Sofia Vergara and Byung-hun Lee announced that Son of Saul is the 2016 Oscar Winner for Foreign Language Film was most likely very special to all Hungarian hearts. We’ve waited 34 years for another Academy Award success and László Nemes’s captivating Holocaust drama, Son of Saul, finally broke the ice last night.
István Szabó’s Mephisto (1981) won our only foreign-language honour before Son of Saul, and his Hanussen (1988) was the most recent Hungarian nominee in the category until now. The movie was accepted very well by the international press since its first success, so much so that for instance, theguardian.com listed it as the best film of 2015. Let’s see what others write about the success!
Independent.co.uk writes that “what makes Son of Saul particularly remarkable is that the film was financed (when everybody else turned it down) with Hungarian public support through its national film fund.”
Entertainment Weekly’s critic Chris Nashawaty gave Son of Saul an A and called it an “absolute masterpiece.” “It’s impossible to be a lover of cinema without having been down this road before in films like Schindler’s List and The Pianist,” he writes. “But Nemes is telling his story in a revolutionary new way—and it’s devastating.”
According to variety.com, their critic, Justin Chang, called Son of Saul “as grim and unyielding a depiction of the Holocaust as has yet been made on that cinematically overworked subject — a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms.”
Reuters.com emphasized that “several different languages are spoken in the Hungarian-produced film, reflecting the polyglot nature of the grim world of the World War II death camps.”
Latimes.com writes that “Son of Saul is a collage of the unimaginable… It has the power of a documentary and the poetic barbarism of the best Holocaust films, including Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List…No matter how many Holocaust films you’ve seen; you’ve not seen one like this”
Lastly, even Bud Spencer congratulated us on his official Facebook page saying “Jó Reggelt to my fans in Hungary and congratulations for the best foreign language film 2016!!”
Photo:www.facebook.com/gezarohrig
Copy editor: bm
Source: Daily News Hungary
