1945: A Holocaust-themed film with the brooding pace of a Western

Filmmaker Ferenc Török’s 1945 studies the aftermath of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Shot in black and white it takes an unflinching look at citizens of small towns in Hungary and elsewhere who benefitted from the deportation of their Jewish neighbours.

The story revolves around two Orthodox Jews (played by Iván Angelus and Marcell Nagy), possessed of steely determination, who return to a Hungarian village to reclaim – the villagers believe – what was taken from them during the Nazi occupation.

There’s a pivotal scene where angry villagers with pitchforks surround the two Jewish men as they pray for lost relatives in the village’s disused Jewish cemetery although the story also touches on non-Jews who kept the possessions of their Jewish neighbour safe when they were transported away by the Nazis.

The film plays out like a classic Western, except instead of waiting for the 3:10 to Yuma we attend the arrival of the 3:10 from Auschwitz. The New York Times’s Ben Kenigsberg said 1945 was “a Holocaust film built, consciously or not, on a reversal of the tropes of the western, down to ticking clocks that might as well be nearing high noon.”