There were a series of themes and subjects uniting the films this year. Three films which touched on themes connected with family were favorites of mine. The improbable reconciliation between a young Cuban drag queen and his dying ex-boxer father was the subject of Viva. At the end of Rams, two brothers who have not spoken for 40 years must depend on one another for survival while they try hide their sheep (the bloodlines are a family heirloom). The story arises out of the isolation and the extreme challenges of the spacely populated Icelandic landscape. The sheep disappear in the snow and the brothers are lost in a blizzard. The problematical brother, who has been saved from hypothermia when he was drunk several times by his more responsible sibling, has to save his brother. He digs an igloo and takes all of his and his brother’s clothes off and embraces him to keep him warm. It is a beautiful moment which reminds us that when the chips are down, love might save us, and the sheep, both brothers' sole objects of love and affection, are magnificent. (Grimur Hakonarson 2015)
 
The meaning of the family, the appearance of children as hope for the future, is at the desperate center of Son of Saul. Directed by a first-time, and hence unspoiled, Hungarian Lázló Nemes and starring an intense and gloomy poet, Géza Rohrig, this frightening Holocaust film integrated subject, structure and style with an unrelenting sense of urgency. The opening shot brings the main character out of a blur into focus in the foreground and soon we understand that he is one of the people called sondercommandos who usher the Jews into the gas chambers. The film was screened in a 35 mm print, increasing its presence and power, Nemes’ (who worked with Béla Tarr) style consists in keeping the main character in the foreground, and allowing chaos to control the rest. My thought was, as I watched the man in close-up, his face dark and tense with the struggle not to react to the horror, what kind of man can do this? He finds a child still alive among the bodies he is clearing out of the gas chamber. The Nazis brutally kill the child, but want an autopsy to see why he survived. Saul thinks that the child is his child and we, the audience, are lost in the confusion the director has produced. He becomes obsessed with giving the child a burial and with finding a Rabbi who can preform the Kaddish. It reminded me of Sophocles’ Antigone, whose story unfolds in the confusion at the end of a civil war. Antigone must bury her brother, so it is that shared gesture which makes us human, the rituals marking the sacredness of human life or simply the business of culture which is constantly in danger of being shattered by the brutality of war, which is at stake for this character in the nightmare chaos of the camps. There is a subplot which is carefully merged with the main action at the end, concerning the practice of killing the sondercommandos and hence destroying evidence after 40 days. Saul, and some others, are planning an escape and hoping to smuggle out photographs to alert the world to the nightmares of the camps. All of this adds another layer of urgency. At one point, in his struggle to bury the child, one of his comrades tells him he has no child. For me the answer to the question of what kind of man can withstand this horror of the camps and the gruesome duties he must perform is that no one can. At the end of the film Saul has lost his mind. His desperate struggle to believe in the future and all of the things that a child can represent, in his situation is madness in itself. There is a sense that the film is a tale told by a madman, like, but more paradoxically unspeakable than Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Murdoch’s The Sea,The Sea.  We do not understand, until we are well along with the narrative, that the person telling the tale (and of course, there is no narrator in film) is mad. It is a remarkable film, tackling the most grave and terrible subject of genocide, which as the gloomy poet actor reminded us in a discussion, is still at hand.