Fateless

aka: Sorstalanság
Hungary / Germany / UK 2005, 140 minutes
Dir. Lajos Koltai
In Hungarian, German, English with English subtitles
Genres: Foreign Cinema, Drama / War

Topics: Period 1940s.

Feat. Marcell Nagy, Aron Dimeny, Daniel Craig

Aroview: Harrowing and distilled vision of the Holocaust adapted from a novel by concentration-camp survivor and Nobel prize-winning author Imre Kertesz, depicts with an unsettling moral ambiguity the voyage of a teenage Jewish-Hungarian boy arrested in Budapest in 1944 and forced to endure the horrors of Auschwitz and other forced-labour camps.

Remarkable both on a narrative level - where startling and impressionistic scenes are fitted into an overall mosaic - and for its original combination of innocence and depravity, while dir. Koltai, formerly cinematographer for Istvan Szabo, also invests the imagery with mysterious resonances. Has been judged by some critics as the most existentialist and coherent of Holocaust dramas to date, this is certainly a match for SCHINDLER'S LIST in dramatising these dark events in a completely new and powerful way.

NZ International Film Festival 2006