Fateless (2005)

Don’t miss this unforgettable story of a child who had the courage to come home.

Set in 1944, as Hitler’s Final Solution becomes policy throughout Europe, Fateless is the semi-autobiographical tale of a 14 year-old Jewish boy from Budapest, who finds himself swept up by cataclysmic events beyond his comprehension. A perfectly normal metropolitan teen who has never felt particularly connected to his religion, he is suddenly separated from his family as part of the rushed and random deportation of his city’s large Jewish population. Brought to a concentration camp, his existence becomes a surreal adventure in adversity and adaptation, and he is never quite sure if he is the victim of his captors, or of an absurd destiny that metes out salvation and suffering arbitrarily. When he returns home after the liberation, he missed the sense of community he experienced in the camps, feeling alienated from both his Christian neighbors who turned a blind eye to his fate, and the Jewish family friends who avoided deportation and who now want to put the war behind them.

Psycological Interesting.

If you are looking for movies with explicit content abouth the WWII or the Holocaust this in not your movie. However it is quite and interesting story in wich you can see different point of views about this war and what was happening in the end.

A nice movie to have in any collection. Whit a very interesting ending "monolog" from the main character... October 13, 2008

On Par with Schindler's List

I would like to spend a few lines comparing Fateless to Schindler's List, but not until I describe Fateless first. Fateless is a movie based on Imre Kertesz best-selling novel "Fatelessness" about his own experiences during the Holocaust in Hungary. The film begins with our protagnist witnessing his father being called up to a "labor camp." Later, on his way to work, he himself is grabbed by the SS and transported via rail to Auschwitz, the most evil of all the extermination camps.

On his way, the protagonist encounters evil in many forms. The SS that beat and degrade him and the rest of the Jews without regard for their humanity. Later, in the concentration camps we notice the main characters demise and lost of interest in life. Many of his fellow inmates struggle to get him to care about life and to have hope, but he is just merely to exhausted and disgusted with life to care at this point.

At his most vulnerable point and on the cust of death, liberation comes and the protagonist is saved from a certain death. He then return to Hungary to witness that many people have continued life as if nothing happened. To make matters worse, many of his fellow-countrymen and even his fellow Jews are indifferent to his suffering at best and disgusted by him at worst. We notice that the protagonist is changed. He has no hope. He talks about his experiences and describes them as normal. Not normal in the real world, but normal is his mind.

The movie in itself is very powerful but it leaves you asking many questions. It definitley doesn't provide you with a "happily ever-after" ending. It is an awkward feeling to have a film with such violence and evil and suffering and not have any good come out of it.

Feeling jipped out of a good ending, I went to the Special Features section and found an interview with Kertesz about the film. Imre Kertesz not only wrote the novel "Fatelesness," but he also wrote the script to the film "Fateless." In a section of the interview, Kertesz expresses his disgust for the film Schindler's List. He takes great exception to the "happy" ending portrayed in that film. He argues that there wasn't always a silver lining to the suffering of the Jews. In fact, there hardly was one. The reality of the Holocaust was that there was a massive scale extermination and infliction of suffering with no purpose. There was no greater cause. No good that came out of it. For example, in Schindler's List we see that "Schindler Jews" at the end of the movie and we feel a sense of relief, that there was some good that came out of all that suffering. Also, we witness the Jews waving at Oskar Schindler in that movie and saying "hi boss." Kertesz argues that this is just no factual. Everyday life in extermination camps robbed you of your humanity. The exhaustion, the lack of rational behavior, it all compounded and greatly affected the psyche of the Jews. In Imre Kertesz' case, there was no good that came out of his suffering, so he didn't want to portray a film as such. Therefore, you are left with a raw film with no hope. Suffering and pain for the sake of suffering and pain. It is very powerful and a must-see for everyone. A must-have, especially for those with an interest in the Holocaust and WWII. February 10, 2008

Powerful!

A riveting, beautifully filmed and scored-musically (by Ennio Morricone), Hungarian movie about survival and death in German concentration camps during World War II. It is from a novel and screenplay by Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

It depicts in part how some Jews--for example, "Capos"--abused their fellow Jews; and it follows one young boy (played by Marcell Nagy) from Budapest to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz (where Kertész was a prisoner), and his return to Budapest at the end of the war. There he is subjected to further travesties and indignities--Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, as Rabbi Harold S. Kushner has written.

While I have watched many films about the Nazi Holocaust (and visited Dachau outside of Munich), this one may be the most powerful. It is brilliant; and the director, Lajos Koltai, deserves enormous praise. Obviously the Jews were persecuted; and human beings are wronged today in America and other countries of the world, where at the very least attempts are made to break the human spirit. Those who were persecuted learn to persecute others, and often they do not think twice about doing it. No guilt, nothing. The film also depicts great kindness, compassion, generosity and love shown by some inmates to their fellow prisoners.

"Everyone needs some life-giving obsession. Something to keep their hope alive."

The words of one of the camp prisoners. Perhaps our daily obsessions with winning and overcoming injustices, and reuniting with loved ones despite considerable odds, are what keep us going. In today's world, in America, people still live in fear of knocking at the front door, and being arrested unjustly by America's equivalent of Hitler's SS, which should never happen in a democracy based on the rule of law.
August 22, 2007

A shocking ordeal through the eyes of a young man!

Fateless is based on the autobiography of Imre Kertesz, who was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps. Kertesz wrote the book in 1975 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

Bringing this to the screen was a huge undertaking, and it shows. Re-creation of the buildings of several camps was so real. Through the eyes of the cinematographer, enormous wide angle shots were used. Numerous shots of the massive operation were magnificent. One got a sense of an entire scope of several buildings in various camps. You could feel just how cold, wet, inhumane and dark this monumental tragedy was.

The musical composition was perfect and moving. In an interview with composer, Ennio Morricone, he said he did the music in three types. One, was folksy child, and we can only relay that to the youth of the boy imprisioned. The other type depicted loneliness, and the third type of music translated the human suffering. The musical score was beautiful!! You can't help notice it and how it set the mood.

In 1944, a Budapest teen, Gyuri Koves' father is preparing for a forced labor camp. Soon, Gyuri is taken for a bus and sent to three different concentration camps.

This film is more graphic than some Halocaust films, and it is in the voice of a young boy, the eyes of a young boy and the inhumane suffering endured by a young boy. He became gaunt, had blistered hands, starving, had an infected knee with maggots, and saw death at a magnitude no one should. Then, it is upon his return home that he views his experience differently.

The DVD features Making of Fateless, and an interview with the author. It is one of the best depictions of the Halocaust. ...Marrianne Rizzuto June 25, 2007

The most painfully real of all Holocaust films.

Lajos Koltai's "Fateless" deserves far more fame in the United States than it has achieved. "Schindler's List" and "The Pianist" have the reputations here, but "Fateless" goes far deeper than any fictional film I have ever seen in giving the audience the total, painful reality of what it must have been like to be a Holocaust victim. Gyurka (Marcell Nagy, a movingly natural young actor) is a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Budapest in 1944. One day, headed for work--his father has already been sent to a labor camp, so school is no longer an option--he is rounded up in a random sweep of the city's Jews and bundled off to a series of concentration camps. In the camps, he is beaten, humiliated and starved nearly to death, for no other reason than that he happened to be on the wrong bus at the wrong time. Liberated after a year of unimaginable suffering, he goes back home to neighbors who find his presence an unwelcome reminder of the recent unpleasantness. The story in "Fateless" is not what matters, but the sheer randomness of events in the camps, as Gyurka finds himself moved about like a pawn on a chessboard, among an ever-changing sea of faces. Suffering is the only constant, and Koltai--working from the brilliant screenplay by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz--gives us Gyurka's physical and mental anguish in bas-relief. Koltai films the story as a series of sharp vignettes, each ending in a fadeout as soon as it has made its point. "Fateless" is rigorous and austere in its rejection of scenes of outright violence; the most piercing scene shows Gyurka, starving and feverish in his bunk, remembering his stepmother's steaming cauldron of homemade soup. Framed by the heartbreaking score of master film composer Ennio Morricone, "Fateless" masterfully brings home the reality of the Holocaust. The DVD contains an interesting mini-documentary about the filming of "Fateless" (including some unintentionally funny English subtitles from the original Hungarian) as well as a riveting interview with Imre Kertesz, who explains why "Schindler's List" is unacceptable as a portrayal of the Holocaust. "Spielberg depicts the Holocaust as some sort of victory for humanity," Kertesz says, "but there was no victory with the Holocaust." Indeed, at the end of "Fateless," Gyurka can't get any triumph over his torturers, or even any sympathy from his neighbors. All he has is the ability to accept what has happened to him, without self-pity, and the courage to go on living. That is the whole point of "Fateless"--and, one might say, of all human existence. May 27, 2007

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