Call it like father, like son: just as his father András Jeles often did, László Nemes also turns his focus to the generation of sons and daughters. The difference is that Nemes tends to delve into the dark chapters of 20th-century history experienced by children. Orphan is set in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian uprising. A boy who believed his father to be a noble man is confronted one day by a brutal stranger who claims to be his biological father. For the boy, the father figure is not just a question of identity, but of original sin. If his father is not an innocent man unjustly imprisoned in a camp, but the one who inflicted violence, how can the boy come to terms with the guilt left behind? Nemes juxtaposes the suffocating atmosphere of life under Communist rule with the inner turmoil of a boy wounded by the legacy of the past. As a result, the film′s method of bearing witness to history through the intersection of the personal and the cinematic has become even more refined. The work shares a historical consciousness with the films of great predecessors like Rossellini and Tarkovsky. A child’s eyes serve as history’s purest judge. (LEE Yong Cheol)