Son of Saul

Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners compelled to assist in the killing at Auschwitz. Amid the daily horror he becomes fixed on the body of a boy he believes to be his son, and he risks everything to find a rabbi and secure a proper burial, moving through an unfolding uprising with the camera held tight to his face and the atrocity kept at the blurred edges of the frame.

The film shows a dissociative fixation as the last defence of meaning, a single act of ritual care held onto when all else has collapsed. For a clinician it is a study of how the mind protects itself under unbearable trauma by narrowing to one impossible task. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016.