The Government is funding free screening of Hungarian Oscar nominee Son of Saul with over 10 million forints, announced Deputy State Secretary for Priority Social Affairs Csaba Latorcai from the Prime Minister’s Office.
13 thousand students and their teachers from some 500 Budapest secondary schools will have the opportunity to watch Son of Saul free of charge within the framework of special history classes, Director of the Uránia National Film Theatre Botond Elekes said at a press conference held to announce the scheme.
The award-winning film by László Nemes Jeles will be screened 30 times by the end of April in the cinema’s main hall within the framework of the school-orientated programme, he added. The first screening will be on Thursday afternoon for 400 students from the Saint Margaret Secondary School in Budapest.
The National Film Theatre will also be publishing 15,000 copies of an information booklet in cooperation with the film’s creators and distributors, which provides suitable historical background information to help school children understand what they see, as well as criteria for analysing Saul’s character during Ethics and discussion classes with their form teachers.
At the press conference, Deputy State Secretary for Priority Social Affairs Csaba Latorcai from the Prime Minister’s Office said the Government is providing over 10 million forints in funding to help realise the series of screenings.
According to Mr. Latorcai, the Government believes that “the horror of the Holocaust, one of the greatest tragedies of Hungarian history, can only never be repeated if young people are suitably informed about it”.
In 2014, the Government held a year of commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust, the Deputy State Secretary pointed out, and Son of Saul was also shot in that year with funding from the Hungarian National Film Board.
Son of Saul has been seen by 143 thousand people in Hungarian cinemas so far and has become the most successful Hungarian film of the past five years, Managing Director of the film’s distributor Mozinet Ltd., Gábor Böszörményi said, adding that the movie is currently still being screened in 47 cinemas around the country.
At the event, one of Son of Saul’s producers, Gábor Sipos, stressed that the free screening of the film to secondary school students represents the realisation of one of the creators’ important aspirations. Producer Gábor Rajna agreed, adding that the greatest possible care was taken to achieve historical accuracy during the film’s production.