"Son of Saul" was hailed at the Cannes Film Festival for its terrifying images and its new take of the Holocaust.

The film, which is directed by first-time director Laszlo Nemes, tells the story of a prisoner Saul, who tries to save the body of a boy he takes for his son in Auschwitz. The Holocaust has been seen through many angles and this film takes a look at the Sonderkommando, work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners, particularly Jews. The men who worked as Sonderkommando have been often overlooked when it comes to the Holocaust and have never really been represented in cinema.

With this film Nemes took a look at the cruelty that these men had to go through in the concentration camps, and he noted that having read the manuscripts he was transported back to the time.

"Decades ago when I decided to make films and [was] interested in films, I wanted to make a story that would take [place] during the Holocaust," he said during the New York Film Festival press conference. "I just didn't know how to do it. So I had to find the angle. I had this willingness to find an angle. But it was difficult. But when I first read about the text and the manuscripts of the Sonderkommando, the crematorium workers, I think it's not well known. ... These texts transported me as a reader into the very heart of the extermination machine."

Nemes could have made a movie that looked at many different people working in the Sonderkommando in the vein of "The Grey Zone." However, he decided to make a film through the eyes of one character.

"Not having this distant point of view but being in the shoes of one person within the killing machine. And I think that was so strong that I thought at the time I wanted to make a film that would take place within the Sonderkommando, within the crematorium, within the execution," he noted.

This informed the look of the film and the way he decided to shoot it. The movie is shot on film in a 4:3 aspect ratio that creates a claustrophobic sense that also does not allow the audiences to see everything on screen. Instead the audience only sees what the character of Saul sees.

"We never wanted to shoot a film in black and white. We wanted to have this sort of very raw film. ... We perceive reality in colors and we wanted to immerse the viewer in reality. But a reality that's not based on the codifications of the Holocaust films. He wanted to really go back to sources and try to recreate that's more truthful in a way to the human experience in the camp and anything that we read on the subject on primary sources. And colors was very important," he said.

Nemes added that he wanted the film to have a documentary approach that created an allusion of reality. This is demonstrated through his shooting style as he uses the plan-sequence style and holds the angles in very tight close-ups providing for a very documentary style and also making the experience even more visceral.

"We did not want to make them too beautiful. We had to find a way to keep them low key. Almost as in a documentary approach. And we wanted to restrict the scope of what we see because we wanted to make a portrait of a man in the concentration camp. By making it 1:37 aspect ratio we limited the background. We didn't want to make a spectacle out of the background. We wanted to really focus on one individual. Because we wanted to give the measure of one individual."

The movie is sure to be divisive among audiences but will likely move those who see it. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing the film on Dec. 18 and it is Hungary's official Oscar selection.

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