Screening of Oscar-winning Son of Saul, first time in Hungarian in New York

The Balassi Institute – Hungarian Cultural Center, the Hungarian House of New York, and the American Hungarian Library and Historical Society cordially invite you to the first Hungarian screening of Son of Saul, Golden Globe- and Oscar winning Hungarian movie about the Holocaust, followed by public discussion with leading actor Géza Röhrig. The screening takes place at 27th April, Thursday, 6.30 pm.

The film was directed by László Nemes Jeles. The screening will be in Hungarian with English subtitles. There will be a reception before the screening. After the film there will be a public discussion with Géza Röhrig, lead actor of Son of Saul and Zita Vadász, director of the Hungarian Cultural Center.

Son of Saul (Hungarian: Saul fia) is a 2015 Hungarian drama film directed by László Nemes Jeles and co-written by the director and Clara Royer. The movie is based on authentic documents and uses the theme of the Holocaust as a background. It is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of Saul Ausländer, played by Géza Röhrig, a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando. Hermetically sealed from the rest of the camp and waiting for their own pending execution by the Nazis, workers are forced to take part in burning the victims of mass destruction and removing their ashes. Believing a dead child to be his own son, Saul decides to attempt the impossible: to save the child’s body from cremation and to contact a Rabbi, with whom he can secretly bury the child and say a Kaddish according to tradition. The film premiered in Cannes and won the Grand Prix of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. The film went on to win the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Hungarian film to win the award.

Géza Röhrig was born in 1967. In the 1980s, he was the front man of an underground music band called Huckleberry (also known as HuckRebelly), whose concerts were almost always interrupted by the Communist authorities. He studied Hungarian and Polish at the Eötvös Loránd University. After a study tour in Poland, he portrayed poet Attila József in a film by József Madaras. He was admitted to the Theater and Film School of Hungary and studied filmmaking under István Szabó, graduating in 1993. He has lived in the Bronx borough of New York City since 2000 where he received a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a Hasidic Jew and has been a kindergarten teacher at Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, NY. For portraying Saul Ausländer, he received the Kossuth Prize.

Please learn more about the screening and our other events here!