Fateless

Germany released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. LANGUAGES: German (Dolby Digital 5.1), Hungarian (Dolby Digital 2.0), English (Subtitles), ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (2.35:1), SYNOPSIS: The visual beauty of Lajos Koltai's "Fateless" is unmistakable, and also a bit disconcerting. This is, after all, a movie about the Holocaust, which follows a 14-year-old Jewish boy from Budapest to Buchenwald, where it lingers in mud, misery and death. The film was written by Imre Kertesz, who based the screenplay on his autobiographical novel of the same title. His rendering of his childhood experience, on the page and now on screen, is by no means an attempt to aestheticize an unredeemable chapter of history. It represents something stranger and more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful. "Fateless" bears no resemblance to Roberto Begnigni's "Life Is Beautiful," which turned a death camp into a theater of sentimental kitsch. It has more in common with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation. The two films, indeed, rank among the best nondocumentary cinematic treatments of the Holocaust yet produced dry as well as devastating, and illuminated by surprising flashes of absurdist humor that carry the authority of lived experience. SPECIAL FEATURES: Featurette, Interactive Menu, Music Video, Product Description