While debuting his third feature “Moulin” at the Cannes Film Festival last week, “Son of Saul” director László Nemes warned of an “orgy of antisemitism” that is “overtaking the West.”
It’s why, by his measure, the follow-up to his 2016 Oscar win for Best International Feature, last year’s “Orphan,” has yet to land U.S. distribution. Described as an “intensely personal” movie that explores post-World War II Hungary and one family, the movie is also based on his own father’s life. Nemes attributed its lack of traction Stateside to mounting anti-Jewish sentiment.
“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the west,” he told The Guardian in a May 18 interview. Nemes added that cultural and online worlds have been overtaken by “race obsession” and identity politics.
Of his first feature, the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama “Son of Saul,” he said that it wouldn’t even make the Academy’s shortlist if made today “because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered … Nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole.”
Nemes also pointed to filmmakers and creatives who called for a boycott of Israel in September 2025.
“I think it’s all anti-humanist regression. And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading,” he told the paper. “And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism … The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the west has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.”
When told that those who signed the boycott believe they did so in support of huma rights, Nemes added, “We know how totalitarian mindsets work … This kind of ideology always attaches itself to the sense of being on the right side of history, being on the righteous side. There’s a very strong, moralising, puritan surface on which this ideology can attach itself.”
After writer Jonathan Freedland (who is Jewish and whose mother is Israeli) noted that those people “would surely insist that they were motivated by nothing more than anger at Israel’s conduct, including the killing of 70,000 Palestinians, many of them civilians, in the strip,” Nemes engaged in a bit of a whataboutism.
“Well, where were they when Bashar al-Assad killed at least 600,000 people in Syria? Where were these people with their beautiful ideas when children [were] in direct need of U.N. feeding, by the million, in Yemen? The list goes on and on and on. So where were these beautifully moral people then?” he answered.
“Obviously they prefer to attach themselves to an ideology that’s been around for a long time and that pretends to be humanitarian, but it’s actually not what it purports to be … Had they really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels,” Nemes continued. He then made it clear the “totalitarian death cult” is Hamas.
Of those who have asked him about Gaza when he’s presented “Moulin,” Nemes said that it is “tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally. You know, from their pools and luxury homes in the Valley and Hollywood hills. Do I really have to listen to millionaires lecture the world about morality? I don’t think anybody wants that.”
Read the entire interview at The Guardian.
