Fateless

FATELESS is based on Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz' stunning novel about a Hungarian Jewish boy's experiences during and after the Nazi occupation of Hungary. One day, Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy) is a typical teenage boy, caught up in the daily dramas of adolescence. When Nazi soldiers take over his native Budapest and begin imposing restrictions on the city's Jewish citizens, his comfortable life changes profoundly. Gyuri resents these restrictions, especially since he has never considered himself particularly Jewish. A rapid succession of events forces him to reconcile himself to this new daily reality. His father is taken by the Nazis and Gyuri himself is deported to a series of distant concentration camps, where survival becomes a daily goal. Gyuri prevails and is liberated by American soldiers.

Still clad in his striped prison clothes, he returns to Budapest. Immediately, he senses the indifference of his neighbors to his experience. Former friends urge him to "put the ordeal out of his mind," while a sympathetic intellectual keeps referring to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." Gyuri can relate to neither cliché and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.

--© THINKFilm

"Fateless will be inevitably compared to Schindler's List and especially The Pianist; while no single scene is as harrowing as the strongest moments in either of those movies, it's more sustained than either."
-- J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

"More than just another Holocaust memoir, Fateless is something special: an unforgettable portrait of grief and hope, loss and transcendence."
-- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"A distinguished addition to the canon of Holocaust-themed cinema, Lajos Koltai's Fateless is both haunting and poetic."
-- Frank Scheck, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"A disturbingly beautiful film."
-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"Lajos Koltai's film, which follows a Jewish boy from Budapest to Buchenwald, ranks among the best nondocumentary cinematic treatments of the Holocaust yet produced."
-- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES

"As you'd expect from a cinematographer's movie, it's visually striking. But as its ambiguous postwar scenes of its embittered, bewildered hero display, it is also probing beyond its subject's customary parameters for fresh perspective."
-- Gene Seymour, NEWSDAY

"Profound and majestic."
-- Kyle Smith, NEW YORK POST

"This unique and devastating look at the Holocaust is drawn from the autobiographical novel of 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz."
-- Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE