Cannes interview with lead actor of the film

The star of one of Cannes’s most controversial – and acclaimed – movies so far has launched an impassioned defence of the Sonderkommando, the group of concentration camp prisoners who oversaw the deaths of millions in the gas chambers and then disposed of the bodies.

Géza Röhrig, who makes his screen debut in Son of Saul as a Jewish man forced to perform such tasks, reacted with anger to the suggestion, made by a journalist, that members of the Sonderkommando were “half-victim, half-hangman”.

“There has to be a clarification,” he said. “They are 100% victims. They have not spilled blood or been involved in any sort of killing. They were inducted on arrival under the threat of death. They had no control of their destinies. They were as victimised as any other prisoners at in Auschwitz.”

Röhrig conceded that such confusion did persist, with even Primo Levi having insisted that the Sonderkommando were in some sense collaborators. “Of the 20 or so who are still alive many didn’t reveal their work even to their families after the war because they were regarded so negatively. But in 2015, no one should call them part-killer.”

The film, which has attracted a raft of five-star reviews, is also the debut of its 38-year-old director, László Nemes. Set as the Allies approach in October 1944, it unfolds over a day and a half as the prisoners plot a rebellion and Saul comes across the body of a young man to whom he wishes to give a proper burial. Its vivid, handheld shooting style, which gives the horrors of the Holocaust a new immediacy, can be regarded as an attempt to honour the dead in appropriate fashion, as its protagonist does.

Nemes and his co-writer drew inspiration from the testimony of such prisoners written at the time, but said they wanted to avoid “the stuff of books”. “We didn’t want to stand back from the situation, to establish a historical distance. We can’t put post-war emotions on it. We didn’t want to make a beautiful film full of icons, or for it to be emotional in the conventional sense. Because after several months, these men are empty of conventional emotions.”

Though many audience members have confessed to finding the film a troubling watch, graphic content is largely kept blurred in the margins of the screen; the camera’s focus remains on its leading man’s face. Likewise the audio mix tones down the terrors.

“A really realistic sound would have heard nothing but people crying because they were dying,” said Nemes. “We tried to be very restrained. Cinema seems more and more keen on giving more and more. I think less is more and the right way was to rely on the imagination of viewers to reconstruct something that cannot be reconstructed. For them to create in the mind the experience of the extermination camp.”

The film is the only Hungarian title in competition. The producers had hoped it would be a co-production but funding bodies in France and Israel turned it down on account of the subject matter’s “riskiness”.

It is expected that the film, which tackles a time in history Jean-Luc Godard famously felt cinema had failed to properly address, will go home with a prominent prize next Sunday evening. Nemes’s direction has taken the lion’s share of praise, but many are also tipping Röhrig, whose traumatised detachment fills almost every frame.

“The expectation was for me to dance in a very small area in a very minimalist way,” he said. “Usually you are able to shine and create moments. Not here.” The actor also said the experience of the shoot had triggered a personal crisis of faith. “As a person who believes in God, I had an experience making this that was very struggling and hard.”

A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.