Legendary Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has spoken plainly about “an orgy of antisemitism overtaking the West.”
In a new interview with The Guardian published on Monday, the acclaimed director discusses bringing his latest World War II venture — a biopic on the French resistance hero Jean Moulin — to the Cannes Film Festival, but much of the piece centers on what Nemes describes as a “puritan, moralising, self-righteousness” looming over Hollywood.
Nemes, who won an Oscar in 2016 for Son of Saul, begins by considering reaction to the award-winning film, as well as 2025’s Orphan. The former follows a day-and-a-half in the life of an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner, while the latter is about a young Jewish boy’s search for his missing father, as he instead unveils the truth of his mother’s survival of the Holocaust.
Nemes tells the U.K. publication about Son of Saul‘s award success: “I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today. Because of the politicisation of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered… Nobody would touch it with a 10ft pole.”
Orphan, which he says was “ignored” at last year’s Venice Film Festival, failed to nab an Academy Award nod for best international feature, and has so far not landed a U.S. distribution deal: “You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” he continues, saying he feels “a little bit” ostracized by the industry: “Even some response [to Orphan] from the media smells of an ideological standpoint.”
Orphan
Venice Film Festival
On widespread boycotts of Israeli film institutions — a pledge last year objecting to the war in Gaza featured names such as Olivia Colman, Ayo Edebiri, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone and 1,300 others — Nemes tells The Guardian that he believes it to be “anti-humanist regression.”
He adds: “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 [cast 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.” When asked by journalist Jonathan Freedland if he thinks antisemitism is now at its worst since Nazi Germany, Nemes responds: “I think it’s getting there.”
He describes it as an “obsession with Jews” and says, referring to Orphan‘s struggle to find a distributor, “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”
“It’s tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally,” adds the filmmaker. “You know, from their pools and luxury homes in the Valley and Hollywood hills. Do I really have to listen to millionaires lecture the world about morality? I don’t think anybody wants that.”
Toward the end of the interview, Nemes calls out fellow Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, who is best known for making the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. At the 2024 Academy Awards, British director Glazer said in his acceptance speech that he and producer James Wilson “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
Nemes, who criticized Glazer for the speech that year, considered how he feels about it today. “Making a film about the Holocaust imposes on its maker a need for responsibility,” he told Freedland. “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.”
He concluded that filmmakers should focus on making good movies and resisting “the treacherous, destructive power of the studio system.”
