‘An orgy of antisemitism is overtaking the west’: Son of Saul’s László Nemes on Hollywood hypocrisy

His extraordinary Auschwitz film won every award going. Now the Hungarian director is back with new drama Orphan, as well as a Jean Moulin biopic at Cannes. He talks about resurgent global prejudice – and refusing to be lectured by the film industry ‘overclass’ We’ve been talking for less than five minutes when I spot the swastika. It’s just above the head of László Nemes, one of Europe’s most acclaimed directors, as he sits in the suite of a London hotel, talking about Orphan, his intensely personal new film that dwells on – among other things – the impact of the Holocaust on the generations that followed. It’s an ancient, Hindu swastika, part of a decorative wall-hanging – but still. I’m halfway through a question when I notice it. Nemes laughs; of course, he’d seen it immediately. “I wanted to point that out to you,” he says. “It is so funny. Before leaving this room, I will take pictures.” Mind you, he’s had worse. “When I was at the San Sebastián film festival with Son of Saul , t...

Grace review – monumentally odd father-daughter odyssey via mobile cinema

Travelling across Russia in mostly silence, Ilya Povolotsky’s debut feature has a strange confidence in its own insistent dispiritedness

With long journeys in a red camper van, long unbroken shots of shattered Caucasian landscapes, and very long silences between its alienated father and daughter, Ilya Povolotsky’s debut feature has a strange confidence in its own monumental dispiritedness. “I want to know that you have a plan,” says the teenager. “And that we won’t get stuck somewhere outside Khabarovsk with a chicken and a sad librarian woman.” This being a Russian art film, you wouldn’t bet against it.

The two unnamed characters, played by Maria Lukyanova and Gela Chitava, are making their way across the country for unspecified reasons, other than her desire to see the sea. They run a small mobile cinema out of their van for wan residents of purgatorial steppe towns and flog snacks and porn by night at sketchy truck stops for the hauliers who aren’t with sex workers. The father has transient liaisons of his own, adding an accusatory edge to his daughter’s faraway gaze, frequently fixed on nothing. Things aren’t looking up when they reach the sea; local people are scooping dead fish off the foreshore. “Fish plague,” says a police officer. “You’d better leave now.”

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