#geza rohrig

[opheliaintherushes]

I still can't believe Spielberg didn't rush the stage to slap Jonathan Glazer after that speech, especially after he heaped praise on The Zone of Interest as the best movie made about the Holocaust since Schindler's List.

Spielberg is wrong, of course, Son of Saul was made in the interim, and is a masterpiece (Geza Rohrig is my forever Oscar snub). But The Zone of Interest is a brilliant film, casting a cold eye on Rudolf Hoss and his wife as they go about their daily lives in the shadow of Auschwitz. It would seem to be a story about the banality of evil, par excellence.

But there's two things to dissect here:

1) there's a tangled legacy with the banality of evil; it's a good phrase, it explains or excuses a lot of savagery, anyone can be swept up if they find themselves in the wrong historical moment. Except people have been criticizing Arendt for coining it from the moment she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann wasn't some bureaucrat who went along with the machine; he was obsessed with Jews, studied them, he organized the deportation of the Hungarian Jews near the end of the war, almost 450,000 of them, 12,000 a day, and even arranged his own trains when he was told to stop.

2) Hoss, of course, was the man who was on the receiving end of this; The Zone of Interest ends at the moment of his reassignment back to Auschwitz to deal with the mass influx of of Jews. Hoss also wasn't some abstract figure who lived next to the camps. He was an unrepentant Nazi from the earliest days of the party, and honed his cruelty in Dachau and Sachsenhausen until he turned Auschwitz into the most effective extermination machine the world has known.

If audiences feel incriminated by The Zone of Interest, that's on them. This was a crime against Jews, executed by a society that hated Jews, and overseen by officials who embraced the chance to wipe them out in the most efficient and organized way possible. The Holocaust isn't a lesson, isn't a yardstick of your morality, isn't a rhetorical device, isn't a scenario where you play 'what I would have done.' It isn't the beginning or end of antisemitism, or the beginning or end of Jewish history.

If Glazer feels guilty as a Jew, there's not much I can do about that. But how can he not feel the same sock to the gut I do when The Zone of Interest finally flashes to the present to show exactly the extent to which Hoss dedicated himself to the eradication of our people?

[cultfaction]

Undergods trailer released

Lightbulb Film Distribution is delighted to share the poster and trailer for new dystopian fantasy-thriller, UNDERGODS, which will be coming to cinemas and digital download on May 17th 2021. In a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, K and Z roam the streets on the lookout for corpses and something even more valuable – fresh meat. Following UNDERGODS world premiere at Fantasia last year, the film…

[saturdaynightmovie]

Geza Rohrig, Daisy Pugh-Weiss and Elizabeth McGovern in

The Chaperone (2018) Director: Michael Engler

[tribeca]

Traumatized by the death of his wife, a Hasidic cantor (Géza Röhrig) obsesses over how her body will decay. He seeks answers from a local biology professor (Matthew Broderick) in Shawn Snyder’s To Dust, the unlikeliest of buddy comedies. Winner of Best New Narrative Director and the Narrative Audience Award at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival Snyder’s hilarious film is also a wrenching meditation on grief and features, in Son of Saul’s Röhrig, one of the past year’s most underrated screen performances.

Check out Snyder’s gripping feature debut, nominated for Best Screenplay at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards and now streaming on Amazon Prime Video! 📺

(Source: Amazon.com)

[matthiasschoenaertssource]

Now, we have more enticing details, including the first cast members. Oscar winner Mark Rylance unveiled he’s part of the film, as well as two more additions to the ensemble, while speaking to Allocine at the Deauville American Film Festival. Matthias Schoenaerts, who has a role in A Hidden Life, will reteam with the director, while Son of Saul star Géza Röhrig is also coming on board.

Here’s where things get more intriguing as Rylance reveals he’ll be playing Satan, Schoenaerts is playing Saint Peter, and Röhrig will be playing Jesus. Translated from French, Rylance added, “Terry wrote four versions of the character of Satan, and I thought I would play only one. But I heard I was going to play all four.”

[letterboxd-loggd]

The Chaperone (2018) Michael Engler

August 24th 2019

[spaceasianmillennial]

I interview a director of one of my favorite oddball comedies about grieving.

Follow Me: @Maximinalist

Writing and Editing Services / Instagram

Comments and shares appreciated

[bluecollarfilm]

To Dust (2019)

Shmuel (Geza Rohrig), a Hasidic cantor in Upstate New York, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace, while secretly obsessing over how her body will decay. As a clandestine partnership develops with Albert (Matthew Broderick), a local community college biology professor, the two embark on a darkly comic and increasingly literal undertaking into the underworld.

Directed by:   Shawn Snyder

Starring:   Matthew Broderick, Geza Rohrig

Release date:   February 8, 2019

[moviesinfocus]

New Poster & Trailer For Chino Moya’s Dystopian Nightmare UNDERGODS Ahead Of UK Release

New Poster & Trailer For Chino Moya’s Dystopian Nightmare UNDERGODS Ahead Of UK Release

Movies In Focus saw commercials and music video director Chino Moya’s feature debut Undergods at its world premiere during the 2020 Fantasia Festival.  Deliberately opaque and obtuse, Moya’s film is a morality play about society and the family unit. It’s a film where the characters are as important as the dystopian setting and where the science fiction aspect to the film is more about window…

[casualarsonist]

Son of Saul review

When it comes to harrowing stories from World War Two, you can take your pick really - would you like to talk about the slaughter of seventeen million people, including six million Jews, during the Holocaust, or the Japanese mass-murder and mass-rape of up to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians known as The Rape Of Nanking, or the subjugation and enslavement of entire countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia at the hands of the German army? If these aren’t to your liking, there are plenty more to choose from, but no matter your choice, it’s beyond a doubt that the event is one of the most uniquely harrowing and well-depicted catastrophes in human history. And whilst some films have gone to lengths to portray the disturbing inhumanity of it all, few have delved into what might arguably be one of the most horrific stories of all - that of the Sonderkommando. Literally meaning ‘special unit’, Sonderkommando was typical Nazi doublespeak that applied to two separate and unrelated groups, the first a unit of the SS, and the second a work unit of Jewish men picked from the ranks of those imprisoned in concentration camps specifically for the purpose of disposal of the corpses of victims of the gas chambers. 

Yeah. 

They were forced on pain of death to work, with no warning in advance nor right to refuse the task given to them. Their first duty was usually to dispose of the corpses of their predecessors - an activity that clearly defines the Nazi’s keen mastery of creating an atmosphere of utter fear and hopelessness. This cycle of extermination was due to the fact that they held intimate knowledge of the terrible secret of the gas chambers, and thus they were kept separate from the rest of the camp and then killed when they had outlived their immediate usefulness. The Sonderkommando occupy one of the most terrible places in human history. Their stories were rarely shared outside the walls of the camps, both due to the Nazi’s effectiveness at disposing of the ‘evidence’ of their crimes, as well as the fact that survivors often wanted nothing more than to forget what they had experienced, but over time and through the thorough and relentless dissection of all aspects of the war a picture, a glimpse, of the hell they went through came to light. And here, in László Nemes’ film, Son of Saul, we are given a most personal insight into what that experience might have been. 

Hold onto your hats children, because this isn’t going to be fun. 

Son of Saul follows Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner and Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. The film begins amidst the action with a strict focus on Saul alone. In the background, blurred just beyond the peripheries of the camera’s eye we see the concrete walls, the incandescent bulbs in metal cages, the barking Nazi officers commanding herds of terrified and naked people into cramped rooms as they tell them that they’re just going in for a shower, before shutting heavy metal doors on them. Through it all, Saul keeps his eyes to the ground, or on the task before him. We hear the wailing, then the banging at the door, then the silence. We see the Sonderkommando collect the clothes that were left for collection under false pretences, and we see Saul scrubbing the floors of the chambers, washing blood and faeces and vomit away. We see him carting bodies out from the piles in which they fell. And we see a Nazi doctor as he coolly suffocates a child - a boy that accidentally survived the process. Without explanation, Saul offers to take the boy’s body to the prison doctor, a fellow Hungarian, who agrees not to perform an autopsy so that the boy may be given a Jewish burial. Thus begins Saul’s journey to offer one last act of respect to this boy. What instigates this compulsion, and why this child, of all things, is the one thing that compels a man dealing every day with the horror and despair of his work to risk his life is largely left hidden, and even when a reason is revealed it’s uncertain as to whether it’s true. But regardless of the reason behind his actions, the question at the heart of it all is simply this - what price does one put on retaining their own humanity? 

Röhrig’s understanding and portrayal of a man in unimaginable circumstances is an utter triumph of truth in cinema - both he and the film eschew all melodrama, offering nothing but discrete and sober emotion fighting against a world in which the only thing left to feel is despair, and as his journey progresses we are exposed to the minimalist sight of a human trying to claw his humanity back from a world that only exists to shred it away from him. Throughout the film Saul is largely impassive, but Röhrig doesn’t hide from the camera the decay of his character’s soul through his experiences, and through him we begin to learn the language of life in the camp and we see how these men hold on to (or in some cases, let go of) the little they have left in order to simply get through another day.

Through all this though, it never feels like the film is being dishonourable or disrespectful because in many ways Son of Saul is a horror film without gore, a war film without war, and a Holocaust film in which the Holocaust is barely seen. Don’t get me wrong - this film is relentless - but through much of it, Saul is one of the few agents in the camera’s focus, whilst the rest of the camp exists just outside of the frame or semi-obscured in the background. Most of what we experience of the outside world is forced on us by the incredible and devastating sound design, or hinted at in the periphery of the shot, something that would almost be more digestible if it were right there in front of us and we were able to accuse it of being exploitative. But like Saul himself, as much as one would wish to be able to shut out and ignore the things going on around him, the best one can do is divert their gaze. This method of training the audience’s focus is employed to its greatest effect in the opening scene, and allows the film to maintain a minimalist style elsewhere. We get no view of the greater goings on as we do in Schindler’s List, for example, but to be honest, had this isolated, focused, and personal story been diluted by extraneous attachments, Son of Saul wouldn’t be nearly as effective or as necessarily shattering. 

And I mean ‘necessarily’, because this is a rare and unflinching portrayal of one of the humanity’s worst moments inside of one of humanity’s worst moments - it should never, ever be forgotten that we did this to one another in the not-so-distant past. My girlfriend asked me what I was writing about, and I described the film and the details of the Sonderkommando to her. The look of disgust on her face said enough, but above everything it said ‘why would someone watch this?’, and Son of Saul is obviously not a film for everyone, but it remains one of the most important films that I have ever seen, as well as the hardest I have ever had to watch. But despite all that, it’s not gratuitous; it’s not brimming with violence or spectacle (like the utterly disingenuous Hacksaw Ridge), and it doesn’t stoop to depicting explicit suffering simply to elicit reflexive horror from the audience. Instead it depicts something worse - the true and internal degradation of a person’s connection with life through their forced participation in acts of unfathomable inhumanity. And this is harder to watch than something more blatant because rather than showing your eyes a crude recreation of a person dying, it forces its depictions upon senses that you can’t switch off - through sound, and through your imagination as you unconsciously create in your minds eye the things that are happening out of your field of view. And in this way the film shunts into into the position of the character you’re watching - someone who can’t simply close their eyes and be removed from the situation. 

This was the brutal cunning of the Nazis and the key to the true horror of their regime: in every way, their weapon of choice was terror - the complete immersion of their victims into lives of fear, and pain, and degradation, and death. And of course it does an utter disservice for me to compare, in any way, the experience of someone watching a movie to the experience of the men of the Sonderkommando, but of all the attempts to translate the unimaginable experiences of those that suffered in the concentration camps of World War Two, perhaps this film comes the closest to helping a modern audience understand. 

Son of Saul is devastating and invaluable. I’m compelled to say that it ought to be essential. As this world of ours travels further down a path towards enabling capricious leaders to make decisions that threaten entire countries and cultures and ethnicities, Son of Saul is a reminder of what we are when we stray towards the end of that road. For anyone who wishes to understand this sobering and terrifying reality, Son of Saul is more than worth watching - it is unforgettable.

Outstanding

9/10

[mnmillerfilmrev]

"To Dust is a darkly comic film with a wonderfully complex performance of deadpan delivery and deep sadness from Son of Saul star Geza Rohrig."

-M.N. Miller, Ready Steady Cut

[mymoviedump]

To Dust

Shmuel, a Hasidic cantor in upstate New York, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace, while secretly obsessing over how her body will decay.

[jfc8movie]

“Saul Fia” László Nemes (2015)

[fearsmagazine]

UNDERGODS - Review

DISTRIBUTOR: Gravitas Ventures

SYNOPSIS: In a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, K and Z roam the streets in a truck on the lookout for corpses and occasionally something even more valuable - fresh meat. To pass the time they tell stories, some of which intertwine with their reality and at times end up in the back of their truck, a meat wagon.

REVIEW: Behind UNDERGODS is Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions. Needless to say the production designs and all the technical elements are exceptional, and the acting is quite good also. The directing and the narrative is a bit confusing.

The film is not a linear narrative and is more of an anthology film. The stories weave in and out, for the most part, with little introduction or linkage The individual stories are clearly not set in the same time period as the film’s opening and closing scenes.  One of the stories ends up in the world of the two characters we are initially introduced to and one of the stories does seem to be set in a similar time and place but I couldn’t be certain, even after watching it twice. The majority of the stories clearly  have anything to do with the futuristic, post-apocalyptic world of K and Z. They play out as these bizarre morality tales that are rather interesting but dragged on a bit too long and had me longing for the big reveal. They seem matter of fact and are not trying to make any real point about the human condition or society at large. They simply come across as these strange encounters without any unity of message. The most I could take away from it, if anything at all, is that life is random and pointless, collectively they could be considered a piece of dada cinema, satirical and nonsensical in nature.

The visuals, performances, and the lead in to each tale were engaging enough to keep me watching. Also, as the stories progressed I felt invested in the film and keen to see what would come to fruition. A couple of the episodes, between the performance and the writing, felt very much like a Samuel Beckett play, but never quite reached that level of artistry.

The most insightful aspect I could take away from the film is it’s title in relation to the characters it presents - UNDERGODS. At their core, these are insignificant characters who think too highly of themselves and don’t really amount to much in the large scheme of things. In the end, filmmaker Chino Moya might very well be a brilliant filmmaker and storyteller, or I simply might be reading too much into what’s not there and be making much to do about nothing. The least I would suggest is giving it a watch and seeing if it makes you say, “Hum…” Clearly not a film you would expect of Ridley Scott's Scott Free Production. Still, based on my viewing experience I am curious to see what his next film will be.

CAST: Kate Dickie, Ned Dennehy, Geza Rohrig, Burn Gorman and Tanya Reynolds. CREW: Director/Screenplay - Chino Moya; Producer - Sophie Venner; Cinematographer - David Raedeker; Editors - Walter Fasano, Tommaso Gallone, & Maya Maffioli; Score - Wojciech Golczewski; Production Designers - Marketa Korinková & Jo Sutherland; Visual Effects - Myliaison VFX. OFFICIAL: N.A. FACEBOOK: N.A. TWITTER: N.A. TRAILER: https://youtu.be/lLGMSk7FDlo RELEASE DATE: Theatrical, Cable & Digital VOD Release May 7th, 2021.

**Until we can all head back into the theaters our “COVID Reel Value” will be similar to how you rate a film on digital platforms - 👍 (Like), 👌 (It’s just okay),  or 👎 (Dislike) Reviewed by Joseph B Mauceri

[moviesandmania]

Undergods (2020) premiere of dystopian sci-fi fantasy

Undergods (2020) premiere of dystopian sci-fi fantasy

Undergods is a 2020 dystopian science-fiction fantasy feature film about an otherworldly journey through a Europe in decline.

Written and directed by Chino Moya – making his feature debut – the movie is described in its press blurb as “a collection of darkly humorous fantasy tales about a series of men whose worlds fall apart through a visit from an unexpected stranger.

Set to an original, synth…