Deadline is reporting that Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes (“Son of Saul”) has not only found funding for his third feature, “Orphan,” but that it’s also going to start filming in June.
This will be another historical film for Nemes. It will follow a young Jewish boy in Budapest in 1957, one year after the Hungarian Revolution, which saw a failed uprising against the USSR. The boy’s mother has raised him in the hope that his father will return from the camps. These hopes are shattered when a brutish stranger appears on the doorstep to take his family back.
It’s been six years since Nemes’ last film, 2018’s “Sunset,” which was rejected by Cannes and premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It was seen as a disappointing follow-up to his landmark 2015 film “Son of Saul,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Best International film Oscar.
“Sunset” was inevitably going to be a letdown, even though, I found, it was actually a good film. Expectations were too high for it — there was no way it could match Son of Saul’s success which, in my books, still stands as one of the great filmmaking debuts of the last 30 years.