They were prisoners chosen by the SS to escort new transports of prisoners to the gas chamber buildings, to get them to undress, reassure them and lead them into the gas chambers. What was the Sonderkommando? What did its members do? They describe their daily tasks, how the work was organized, the rules by which the camp was run and Jews exterminated, as well as how they put together a certain form of resistance. The actual documents were found years later. When we were making A londoni férfi (The Man from London), in Bastia, the shoot was interrupted for a week and in a bookstore I found a book of eyewitness accounts published by the Shoah Memorial called Des Voix sous la cendre (Voices from beneath the Ashes), also known as "The scrolls of Auschwitz." It's a book of texts written by former Sonderkommando members from the extermination camps, who had buried and hidden their written testimonies before the rebellion in 1944. How did the idea for Son of Saul come to you? In 2011, he worked on the project as an artist in residence at the Cinefondation Résidence du Festival. Béla Tarr taught him: "To focus on details, to understand a scene's significance, the fact that everything is a consistent and rigorous process from your choice of collaborators all the way to the film shoot." Surrounded by a small, loyal and close-knit team, László Nemes has spent the last five years bringing this project to fruition. He then directed three short films, notably With a Little Patience, which was chosen for the 2007 Venice International Film Festival. He thus became Béla Tarr's assistant on the Prologue segment of the collaborative film Visions of Europe and on The Man from London. László Nemes grew up between two countries and two cultures, choosing to first study in Paris (Paris Institute of Political Studies, then cinema at the Sorbonne, University of Paris 3) before leaving for Budapest, in 2003 at the age of 26, to learn the ropes of filmmaking. His parents, a stage director and a professor, were opponents of the communist regime. INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR LÁSZLÓ NEMESīorn in Hungary in 1977, László Nemes spent his adolescence and young adulthood in Paris, having in 1989 followed his mother who started a new life in the French capital. In such a dark story, I also believe there is a great deal of hope: in a total loss of morality, value and religion, a man who starts listening only to a faint voice within him to carry out a seemingly vain and useless deed finds morality and survival inside. The multi-language dialogue in this Babel of nations participates in conveying the organic, continuous feeling of human perception caught in the midst of inhumanity. Thus, the Inferno we journey through cannot be entirely assessed by the eyes of the viewers, only partially reconstructed in their minds. Depicting an accurate world as truthful to history as possible, the events and places of the horror are shown in fragment, leaving room for the imagination of the viewer. The use of shallow focus photography, the constant presence of off screen elements in the narration of extended takes, the limited visual and factual information the main character and the viewer can have access to - these were the foundations of our visual and narrative strategy. We follow the main character throughout the film, reveal only his immediate surroundings, and create an organic filmic space of reduced proportions closer to human perception. Two days in the life of a man forced to lose his humanity and who finds moral survival in the salvaging of a dead body. This film does not tell the story of the Holocaust, but the simple story of one man caught in a dreadful situation, in a limited framework of space and time. Our aim was to take an entirely different path from the usual approach of historical dramas, their gigantic scope and multi-point of view narration. Son of Saul is an ambitious film carried out in an economical manner, plunging its viewer directly into the heart of a concentration camp.