Documentary director Dénes Nagy explores how conflict erodes loyalty, morality and human consciousness in his award-winning first feature
Hungarian director and documentarist Dénes Nagy makes his feature debut with this gruelling, slow-burning drama set in the vast trackless forests of the eastern front during the second world war, a film which won him the Silver Bear for best director at this year’s Berlin film festival. This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.
Having joined the Axis powers, Hungary sends troops into the grim, freezing forests of Ukraine to secure the territory, keep order, establish supply lines and root out pockets of pro-Soviet “partisans”, naturally making an example of them to cow the other resentful civilians into submission. István Semetka, played by Ferenc Szabó,...
Hungarian director and documentarist Dénes Nagy makes his feature debut with this gruelling, slow-burning drama set in the vast trackless forests of the eastern front during the second world war, a film which won him the Silver Bear for best director at this year’s Berlin film festival. This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.
Having joined the Axis powers, Hungary sends troops into the grim, freezing forests of Ukraine to secure the territory, keep order, establish supply lines and root out pockets of pro-Soviet “partisans”, naturally making an example of them to cow the other resentful civilians into submission. István Semetka, played by Ferenc Szabó,...
- 11/9/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
For his first narrative feature Natural Light, Hungarian filmmaker Dénes Nagy (who has worked in documentary since as far back as 2008) follows in the footsteps of a fellow countryman. In 2015, László Nemes debuted Son of Saul at the Cannes film festival. A deeply serious film, Saul sought to plunge viewers into the horrors of Auschwitz. Nagy’s film takes place a little earlier, and a good bit further to the East, following a squadron of Hungarian soldiers on the Eastern front. The men are there to serve on the side of the Nazis-––although hunger, mud, and sanity seem to be the more pressing concerns.
The nod to Nemes is less to do with having been born in the same part of the world, of course, as it is to do with subject and style––although the two are not necessarily unrelated. It’s also to do with a relatively...
The nod to Nemes is less to do with having been born in the same part of the world, of course, as it is to do with subject and style––although the two are not necessarily unrelated. It’s also to do with a relatively...
- 3/2/2021
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Having imbibed the visual qualities of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sharunas Bartas, “Natural Light” director Dénes Nagy delivers exactly the sort of forest-bound World War II movie one might imagine from a first-time helmer smitten by such masters. Technically impeccable and rigorously cleaving to an aesthetic designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length, the film is so intent on privileging the soldier protagonist’s immovable face (when not focusing on the back of his helmet), so determined to keep him frozen and unknowable, that Nagy dispenses with that key ineffable quality: human emotion. , and certainly on a cerebral level there’s much to appreciate, yet “Natural Light” sheds no warmth and offers no insight into the horrors of the human condition during wartime.
During the Second World War, thousands of Hungarian soldiers, aligned with the Axis Powers, patrolled vast swathes of the occupied Soviet Union, keeping an eye on fractious partisans.
During the Second World War, thousands of Hungarian soldiers, aligned with the Axis Powers, patrolled vast swathes of the occupied Soviet Union, keeping an eye on fractious partisans.
- 3/2/2021
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
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