In the spring of 1945, the first images from the Nazi concentration camps of emaciated survivors and pits full of corpses were shown in newsreels and shocked moviegoers around the world. In the 60 years since, film-makers have been concerned with how to treat the subject of the camps and the larger context of what came to be called the Holocaust. The greatest film on the subject came early on: Alain Resnais's half-hour documentary Night and Fog, made to mark the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Feature films have been more problematic and three have been multiple Oscar winners: Robert Benigni's grotesque comedy Life Is Beautiful, Steven Spielberg's stern, waywardly optimistic Schindler's List and Roman Polanski's earnest The Pianist.

None of these films, in my view, compares with Fateless, a co-production between Germany, Hungary and Britain. It's adapted by Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész from his autobiographical novel and is the directorial debut of his compatriot, Lajos Koltai, one of Europe's greatest cinematographers. Unlike the Polanski and Spielberg films, it uses three languages - Hungarian, German and (briefly) English - each appropriate to the occasion. The central character, Gyuri, is a 14-year-old Jewish boy from a middle-class family in Budapest, where the government and authorities are collaborating with the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War. When his father is sent away to a labour camp, the extended family look on the bright side. Though they all have to wear a yellow star, they argue that Germany is losing the war and, anyway, 'Hungary isn't Poland'.

But one day, Gyuri is taken off a bus on the way to work by a dumb rural policeman, along with other wearers of the yellow star. It seems like some sort of game and the cop is just obeying an order. The order, however, is to round up Jews and pass them on to the vicious, venal anti-semitic militia, who take all their valuables before putting them on trains bound for Poland. A Hungarian border guard offers them water in exchange for anything of value they have left (better leave the stuff to a fellow Hungarian than have the Germans take it, he argues). Gyuri reads the station sign 'Auschwitz-Birkenau' through a crack in the truck's wall. 'Where's that?' someone asks. 'I don't know,' another man answers. 'You ought to, you're a geography teacher,' says a third person.

Gyuri escapes death in the sorting-out process by claiming to be 16 and the film then cuts to him and three friends, their heads shaven and wearing striped prison suits, sheltering outside a wooden dormitory. By this time, all colour has been drained from the film. In this cruel, muddy, foggy world, everything is black and grey. Gyuri's spare, sporadic voice-over records his feelings, but mostly what we see is a puzzling, arbitrary world as experienced by a 14-year-old boy and over the next hour the film creates a sense of timelessness, of a brutal, pointless eternity that might end any second.

From Auschwitz, Gyuri is sent on to Buchenwald. Germans figure as somewhat remote figures, overweight guards munching sausages as the prisoners are starved and worked to death. Most of the torment comes from brutal trustees doing the dirty work to win the favour of their Nazi masters. A long-term prisoner gives the boy survival hints, the chief one being ways of retaining self-respect.
There is some camaraderie between the prisoners, but it is unpredictable and spasmodic. Gyuri fights against demoralisation as he comes to feel that accepting the notion of a purposeless universe is better than believing it's all to do with fate and that he's acting out that historical mission of suffering a rejection that is somehow God's gift to Jews.

Suddenly, while at his lowest ebb and after being briefly taken for dead, he finds himself in a bed with sheets stamped 'Waffen SS'. The eiderdown is a dullish red, life is changing, the Americans are nigh. A US sergeant (an attractive cameo performance from Daniel Craig) offers Gyuri food and advises him to seek refuge in Switzerland or Sweden and then move to the US to get an education. On his Jeep is the first really bright colour we've seen, the red, white and blue of the American flag.

Gyuri, however, elects to return to Budapest, a journey that takes him via a destroyed Dresden, where his group's guide, a communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, is in triumphalist mode. An SS guard is discovered hiding in their midst, pretending to be a camp survivor and, after nearly being lynched, is handed over to the Russians, which might well be an even worse fate.

In a quiet, deliberately anti-climactic coda, Gyuri is back home, still wearing his prison clothes and finding it as difficult to communicate with sympathetic Jews as with embarrassed Gentiles. He rejects consolation and advice. 'Hell doesn't exist, but the camps do,' he says. It will take a lifetime fully to understand his experience.

Fateless is remarkable, vivid, shattering, emotionally and intellectually engaging. There's a restrained score by Ennio Morricone that draws on Jewish and eastern European music and at the film's centre is an outstanding performance by Marcell Nagy, who bears a strong resemblance to the young Bob Dylan.

Acclaimed Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai is best known for his 26-year collaboration with renowned director István Szabó on 14 films, including the 1981 Academy Award-winning Mephisto. Moving readily between Europe and the United States, Koltai considers Szabó's Being Julia (2004) to be his latest Hollywood movie, although it's a European co-production: both Koltai and Szabó received European Film Award nominations. Ironically, Koltai earned his Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography on the Italian production of Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna (2000).

After more than three decades of making movies, Koltai makes his long-awaited directorial debut with Fateless, a film that follows the story of Gyorgy Koves, a young Jewish boy from Budapest whose life is torn apart by the tragic events of World War II. After premiering in competition at the Berlin Fil m Festival last spring, Fateless garnered commercial success in Hungary, becoming not only the highest grossing independent film in the country but also the highest grossing Hungarian film. At December's Washington Jewish Film Festival, Koltai discussed his epic with a captive sold-out audience, including the ambassador from Hungary.

In an interview with The Washington Diplomat, Koltai explained his foray into directing. "After 35 years in the business, you always have the feeling: maybe I can start. It's a long time happening, a long time behind me.... And I have to show my face, my other face. But I've never been very crazy about it. I was always waiting for the right thing. And I almost did another film as director, but I just gave it back at the end. Because even if I have the casting, I had money, location, everything-I just decided not to direct. I was very lucky. And the moment I decided not to do it, this came into my life. That's how these things are happening. That's how your fate is working."

Co-screenwriter Imre Kertész adapted his own book, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Koltai found himself inspired and emboldened by the novel, which he hails as a contemporary classic. "The moment that somebody gave it to me, this book, I just fell in love with this literature. They never read anything like this in Hungarian, and I just thought something happened which is something different. They didn't ask anybody yet to direct this film. I just read it like a possible cinematographer. I just found out this is a wonderful book, and I just kept it so close to me. I just feel maybe I can do this thing because I start to see the images of the film. I start to see these images so precisely-even the boy's face, even all the locations, all the camps, and every important scene. So I said, 'Jesus Christ, maybe I can do this film and direct.' But nobody asked me yet."

Unaware of Koltai's interest in adapting the novel to the screen, Kertesz requested a meeting with him to seek his advice on the first draft of a script that he had co-written with another Hungarian writer. He insisted that the story be told in a linear fashion. As Koltai explained, "Kertész said, 'What do you think about linearity? Because this kind of story cannot happen any other way-just step by step, forward, and goes to the end. There's no other possibility, so you can't really jump in and out with the time. You can't play with the time.'"

H owever, Koltai was not discouraged by these constraints, and he found that Kertész shared his vision for the film. He told Kertesz, "You know what? Finally, we are going inside of people-finally find a human being, to go inside him and to try to look out of him. This little boy opens a very little gap to see this world, totally an un-understandable world, but he wants to understand…. That's totally what I like to do because it's a totally new point of view to make of the Holocaust."

Critics have lauded Fateless as one of the best fictional films about the Holocaust, comparing it to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and The Pianist, Roman Polanski's adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir. According to Koltai, however, Fateless is not a Holocaust film. "It's about a human being, about this boy.... It's not just the Holocaust-it's following the story."

Bypassing casting directors, Koltai and his assistant looked at more than 4,000 photographs of young boys before they settled on Marcell Nagy to play the lead role of Gyorgy. One of the biggest challenges for Koltai was finding the right actors to play each of the 144 named roles. It was essential that Koltai find exactly the right faces to give life to his vision of the story. "I have to find all of them because this film is not just following one fate. I think this film is following a hundred fates.

"It's not just Gyorgy's story. Everybody else is behind him. And the second, third, and fourth role, even the tenth, count for the same importance. Everybody's carrying his fate to the end, to the same way. I made a tapestry behind him of all these faces, so I have to find those faces."