For his first feature-length film, “Son of Saul,” Hungarian writer-director László Nemes decided to tackle a deadly serious topic: the Holocaust.

The film, a Grand Prix winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that will be Hungary’s official entry for the foreign-language film category at the Oscars, stars Géza Röhrig as a Hungarian worker at the Auschwitz crematorium who tries to find a rabbi to give a child a proper burial.

“I wanted the viewer to experience it as firsthand, here and now,” Nemes told TheWrap’s Steve Pond in an interview at the Toronto Film Festival.

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Sony Pictures Classics will release the film on Dec. 18.

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