“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West,” Hungarian Jewish director Laszlo Nemes told Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian in a piece published earlier this week.
Nemes, who is now at the Cannes Film Festival promoting his latest movie, Moulin, is best known for his first feature film, Son of Saul (2015).
Son of Saul is a hauntingly graphic and frightening drama about a member of the Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nemes told The Guardian that he didn’t think that the movie would be so well-received if it came out today.
“I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today... Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered... Nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole,” he said.
Another reason festival decision-makers might have shunned the film today is that it was developed in Israel, at the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in Jerusalem. It is the best-known of the lab’s films.
Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation
Speaking about those who call for a boycott of Israel, he said, “I think it’s all anti-humanist regression. And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading.”
“And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism... The Jew has always been [portrayed as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] Party,” Nemes continued.
Asked whether he really thought antisemitism had gotten that bad, he answered, “I think it’s getting there.”
When he was asked whether the boycott calls against Israel were due to civilian casualties in Gaza, rather than antisemitism, Nemes replied, “We know how totalitarian mindsets work.”
“This kind of ideology always attaches itself to the sense of being on the right side of history, being on the righteous side,” Nemes added. “There’s a very strong, moralizing, puritan surface on which this ideology can attach itself.”
He said he thought that the ideological climate had affected the reception of his previous film, Orphan.
This movie is about a Jewish boy in Hungary in the 1950s who discovers that his mother had to make a horrible compromise to survive the war, and that his birth father is a brutal gentile man.
Orphan, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, has yet to find a US distributor.
“Even some response from the media smells of an ideological standpoint,” Nemes said. “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They would ask] if I signed this or that petition.”
[It’s] tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally
If film industry professionals were so concerned with humanitarian causes, he went on to say, then one wonders why they said nothing about the killings of hundreds of thousands in Syria and the starvation of millions in Yemen, among other issues.
“[It’s] tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally. You know, from their pools and luxury homes in the Valley and Hollywood hills,” Nemes said.
“Do I really have to listen to millionaires lecture the world about morality?” he asked. “I don’t think anybody wants that.”
Nemes also discussed the issue of what he called the West’s apathy regarding Hamas’s control over and oppression of the people of Gaza – an issue which was unlikely to be raised at Cannes by anyone else.
“Had [the elite] really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels,” he said.
According to Nemes, they choose to criticize Israel instead: “There’s this obsession with Jews.
While he said he enjoyed Jonathan Glazer’s movie about the commandant of Auschwitz and his family, The Zone of Interest, he reiterated criticisms he made of that director’s Oscar acceptance speech.
During that address, Glazer spoke about “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.”
In his interview with The Guardian, Nemes said, “I didn’t feel that he was responsible at all. I thought he wanted to please that overclass of Hollywood with the line of good, righteous thought.”
“I don’t believe that he understands anything about the reality of the region, yet he feels the need to do it. And I think it’s very presumptuous, very condescending,” the Hungarian director continued.
Despite his general pessimism about the place of Jewish creators in the world of art and culture, Nemes may find some consolation in the fact that his new film, Moulin, has attracted considerable attention at Cannes, even if the reviews have been mixed.
It is a biopic about Jean Moulin, a leader of the French Resistance who was captured and tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.
While it was shown at the main competition at Cannes, it is not predicted to win any major awards.