Those Who Remained (2019)

One of the most famous Hungarian films of the last years, which was included by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the 2020 shortlist for the Best Foreign Film. The film premiered at the influential Telluride Film Festival in 2019, where many of the significant films participating in the awards season are first screened. This is an austere post-war drama, through which it seems the director Barnabás Tóth screened the PTSD of all Jewish Holocaust survivors. At the center of the film are Aladár, a middle-aged doctor, and a 16-year-old orphan Klára, both of whom lost all their relatives in concentration camps. The events of the film take place between 1948 and 1953. This film is anemic in the best sense of the word - it is quiet, tragic in a way that is not forced, and mournful in a way that is sincere. It is built of trembling conversations between the two unexpected friends, for Klára discovers that only Aladár can understand what she thinks and feels about her religion, her past, about the family that she lost forever. And yet one of the key scenes, which is also perhaps the most powerful, where Aladárshows Klára his pre-war photographs, is silent. Ultimately, this is a drama about a totally broken man, who decided to muster his strength to save another hurting soul.