A movie to talk about
Fateless shooting begins in mid-december
written by Kester Eddy

Hungarian author Imre Kertész became famous overnight one year ago when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his 1975 novel, "Sorstalanság" - "Fateless." Kertész had previously asked Lajos Koltai, the Oscar- winning Hungarian cinematographer, to direct a film based on the novel. With the fame of a Nobel Prize, Kertész’s task was made considerably easier. Kertész spoke recently on how plans were proceeding.

The long-awaited shooting of “Fateless,” the film based on the novel by Nobel prize-winning author Imre Kertész, will begin in Hungary in mid-December and is expected to last until mid-March, director Lajos Koltai told the foreign press in Budapest at the end of October.
Due to the complexity of post-production work, the film should premier “some time before the end of next year,” Koltai added. With a score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, the celluloid version of “Fateless“ will reflect the original words and mood more accurately than most films, or at least that appears to be the joint aim of Koltai and Kertész.
“I read the book on set in Morocco. I had never read anything like it. When [later] I explained to Imre Kertész why I liked it, he said it was exactly why he had written it. He then asked me to direct the film version. He wrote the script, but said: ‘Never forget the meaning of the book.’ I always go back to it,” Koltai said.
“Fateless,” was originally published in 1975 and is a semi-autobiographical story of a Jewish boy taken from a Budapest street one day in 1944 and deported, bewildered, to Nazi concentration camps. Close to death on numerous occasions, he barely survives to experience liberation and his return home to a very different Hungarian capital.
Koltai has chosen a 12-year-old Budapest schoolboy with no previous film experience for the lead role, keeping his name a secret for fear of hounding by the press. “I found him out of 4,000 boys. He does not know he is playing the lead yet, [though] his parents have agreed,” Koltai said.

Imre Kertész talks about the upcoming filming of a movie based on his Nobel Prize-winning book, “Fateless,“ which is set to begin in December

In another surprising move, he has opted to make the film in Hungarian. “It’s crazy to have a group of Hungarian speaking English in a concentration camp,” he said. With a budget of almost EUR 10 million, including backers from Germany and the UK, the film is expensive by Central European standards. However, while many Hungarians, including Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy, support the venture - the government granted HUF 920 million in subsidies for the production with no strings attached - the Holocaust remains a sensitive issue in Hungary. An estimated 600,000 Jews and Roma were deported to their deaths in 1944-45.
“In one village, where we are going to re-create Buchenwald, already two people are critical, saying it is a historical site. It never has been, it is a military firing range,” Kertész said.
Koltai, who makes his directing debut with the film, is nonetheless optimistic. “This is not just another film about the Holocaust. People have not read the book properly. It’s about a boy, and how he gets through. It’s most important to follow the story, his soul, facing the world every day. We have to talk about this,” he said.