"Fateless" is the story that follows 14-year-old Gyuri Koves from his home in Budapest to various German concentration camps toward the end of WWII. The film captures the innocence of young Gyuri, as he experiences life with his family and the uncertainty of his first love, through his travail to a hardened survivor when the war was over.

There are some "best movie moments" in this film that you will not forget. One (and this is not a spoiler) is when the prisoners in the camp are forced to stand in formation for hours, and their tortured and fatigued bodies create a hypnotic human wave.

There is certainly violence from the Germans, though not where Jews are used as rifle target practice, which we have come to expect. Here, the violence from the Germans is more about total indifference to fellow humans. It’s about how fate and determination keep Gyuri alive. He is indeed fateless, without the hope of a future. This film proves once again that just when you think you know everything you want or need to know about wartime atrocities, you are wrong¾ unless, of course, you’ve been there.

This film also provides insight into a condition that society is beginning to understand now, regarding war fatigue. When people survive war, they are fundamentally changed. They just don’t go back to being who they were, whether a soldier or civilian. Both are victims of the ravages of war. When one returns home, he/she finds that home is not the same. Not even close.

This is a very literate and moving film, with the screenplay written by Imre Kertesz, adapted from his novel, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. First time director Lajos Koltai, who boasts a distinguished list of films as a cinematographer, does a fine job. We found the use of brief fades to black between some scenes to be quite effective. "Fateless" is on par with Holocaust stories like "The Pianist" and "Schindler’s List." Though there are no major "stars," the professional production makes it easy to see why this film was nominated for an Oscar ® as Best Foreign Film in 2005.

At the end of the film when a neighbor refers to the concentration camps as "circles of hell," Gyuri tells him that he does not believe in hell but he knows that the concentration camps do exist. We know what he has endured and the look in Gyuri’s eyes surely convey to the man that there is no comparison.