A stunning piece of work

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2016)

By the time I viewed this Hungarian production, it had won the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is a stunning piece of work.
It is not just the dramatic subject matter: the slaughter of Jews at Auschwitz (which I have visited). It is the distinctiveness of the viewpoint - that of a Sonderkommando, one of the Jews forced to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims - and the novelty of the narrow aspect and shallow focus filming with the camera always on his face or over his shoulder so that the horrors are so close and yet quite indistinct.
Depicting just two days of this hell on earth, the story-line endeavours to find some humanity in this madness through one man's wish to arrange a proper burial for a dead boy for whom he feels a strange parental bond.
Remarkably this is the debut work of both director László Nemes and actor Géza Rohrig.