Géza Röhrig – Actor – Son of Saul (Saul Fia)

FRED’s Angelo Acerbi interviews Géza Röhrig, the leading actor of the film Son of Saul (Saul Fia) by László Nemes, in the official competition of the 68th Cannes Film Festival.

Géza tells us how he got ready to play such a delicate role. In this film, he plays a sonderkommando in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He tells us about the challenges that this role posed him and what the role left him with.

SON OF SAUL (SAUL FIA): October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the corpse of a boy he takes for his son.

As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.