Film archive, 2025

Orphan

Árva

Director László NEMES

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

Call it like father, like son: just as his father András Jeles often did, László Nemes also turns his focus to the generation of sons and daughters. The difference is that Nemes tends to delve into the dark chapters of 20th-century history experienced by children. Orphan is set in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian uprising. A boy who believed his father to be a noble man is confronted one day by a brutal stranger who claims to be his biological father. For the boy, the father figure is not just a question of identity, but of original sin. If his father is not an innocent man unjustly imprisoned in a camp, but the one who inflicted violence, how can the boy come to terms with the guilt left behind? Nemes juxtaposes the suffocating atmosphere of life under Communist rule with the inner turmoil of a boy wounded by the legacy of the past. As a result, the film′s method of bearing witness to history through the intersection of the personal and the cinematic has become even more refined. The work shares a historical consciousness with the films of great predecessors like Rossellini and Tarkovsky. A child’s eyes serve as history’s purest judge.

Stills2

Film details

Director: László NEMES
Country/Region: Hungary, United Kingdom, Germany, France
Year: 2025
Length: 132min
Original language: Hungarian
Elsewhere: Letterboxd IMDb Wikidata TMDB Douban

Director

László NEMES

László Nemes was born in Budapest in 1977. After studying history, international relations, and screenwriting in Paris, he worked as an assistant director to Béla Tarr on The Man from London (2007), and later studied directing at New York University. His talent was recognized early through his shorts alone, which won roughly 30 awards at international film festivals. His feature debut, Son of Saul (2015), swept the Grand Prix at Cannes, followed by a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, and a BAFTA, making it one of the most decorated debut features in history. His second feature, Sunset (2018), was invited to the main competition at Venice, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. His third feature, Orphan (2025), drawn from his own father′s true story, was invited to the main competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. His latest film, Moulin, his French-language directorial debut, portrays the final days of Resistance leader Jean Moulin and stars Gilles Lellouche and Lars Eidinger. The film competed in the main competition for the Palme d′Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Capturing the scars of modern Hungarian history with dense, formal precision, Nemes has established himself, at a young age, among Europe′s leading auteurs.

From Busan International Film Festival 2025, No. 30