“Wow!” was the first word the director uttered in his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony. “Thanks to the Academy for this incredible honor, thanks for the Sony Pictures Classics for Tom Bernard and Michael Barker for supporting us. Thanks to Hungary for funding this film. I’d like to share this with Géza Röhrig, my main actor and the incredible cast and crew that believed in this project when no one else did.”
“You know, even in the darkest hours of mankind,” Nemes said, “there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film.”
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called it a “great day for Hungarian filmmaking” and said, “Thank you to everyone.”
Son of Saul was Hungary’s ninth nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film and the second Oscar winner ever, after István Szabó’s Mephisto in 1981. It is also the first Hungarian movie nominated for the Academy Awards since 1988.
Son of Saul enjoyed critical acclaim as an outstanding Holocaust movie. The film unfolds into a “thriller wrapped around an allegory,” as the New York Times described it, a very personal, intense story of human suffering. Variety’s critic wrote that the movie is 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.”
In addition to the 2016 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Son of Saul won the 2016 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.