Orphan is the latest project from Hungarian director László Nemes. He tells us about the challenge of producing work with Jewish themes and his public clash with Jonathan Glazer
The Hungarian director László Nemes makes movies about ordinary people who have been kicked around by history. His Oscar-winning 2015 debut Son of Saul got inside the head of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Sunset, three years later, followed a young Jewish woman through Budapest on the brink of World War I. His latest film, Orphan, uses a 12-year-old boy’s crisis of patrimony as a metaphor for Hungary in the wake of the brutally suppressed revolution of 1956. All three, Nemes says, are about “the heart of Europe, the wounds of the 20th century and the wounds that we keep on carrying with us”. The difference this time is that the story is based on his own family history.
As a child, Nemes’s father, András Jeles, believed that his mother’s husband, murdered in the Holocaust, was his father, until one day a stranger appeared claiming to be his real parent: a crude, abusive butcher who had both sheltered and exploited his mother during the war. It was a shattering revelation. His supposed father was a victim of the Holocaust but his real father was a beneficiary of it. “My father carries in his very flesh the victim and the perpetrator,” says Nemes.
Ever since Nemes’s grandmother told him this story more than 40 years ago, he has been “haunted” by it. Now, he has worked it into a movie about a boy named Andor, played with solemn fury by newcomer Bojtorján Barabás. “It seemed like a Hamlet story,” he says. “The prince talking to the ghost of the father and trying to get rid of the usurper king. The coordinates of this archetypal story could be found in the story of my father’s life.”
András Jeles is also a director of film and theatre, so I wonder what he made of seeing his life fictionalised by his son. “I don’t know,” Nemes shrugs. “The production hired him as a consultant so we integrated a lot of his thoughts on it. But there’s an underlying competition with his son and all this ego stuff. Because it’s so traumatic, this story leaves very deep marks on one’s life and personality.”
