A powerful psychological horror drama film set in Auschwitz, “The Zone of Interest”, won an Oscar for best international film. This triumph shocked critics with its insightful study of normalcy in the shadow of the Auschwitz death camp.
This is the first time a film from the United Kingdom has won an Academy Award in this category, which is open to non-English language films from countries other than the United States.
“As the title of our film suggests, ‘Zone of Interest’ shows where dehumanization can lead at its worst. It shapes the past and present of all of us,” said British director Jonathan Glazer when accepting the award, before issuing a strong statement regarding the conflict in Gaza.
“Right now, we stand here as people who deny Judaism and the Holocaust being taken over by an occupation that has caused conflict for so many innocent people,” added Glazer, who is Jewish.
The German-language film, which received a total of five Oscar nominations and won three BAFTAs, focuses on the family of Rudolf Hoess, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz camp, who lived a stone’s throw from the gassing chamber.
Despite screams and gunshots coming from their beautiful garden, Hoess (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hueller, Oscar nominee for “Anatomy of a Fall”), and their children carry on as if nothing is strange.
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They draw curtains to hide the smoke rising from the burning, they use their swimming pools—life goes on, even when the death train arrives to discharge its condemned passengers.
At one point, Hedwig tries on lipstick she finds in the pocket of a fur coat stripped from a woman who had been gassed. He rejoices when he finds diamonds in a confiscated tube of toothpaste.
“Horror just squeezes every pixel of every image, in sound and how we interpret that sound… It affects everything but them,” Glazer told AFP at last year’s Cannes Film Festival where ‘Zone’ won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize .
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“Everything had to be very carefully orchestrated to feel like it was always there—a terrifying machine that was always present,” he says.
Hedwig’s mother was ultimately dismissive of what was happening outside the walls of the house, but most of the family’s friends and acquaintances were completely indifferent.
The 58-year-old Glazer focuses on the apparent normalcy of daily life around the death camps, seeing the Hoess family not as obvious monsters but as terrifying because of their very ordinary habits.
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“What drives these people is something familiar—a nice house, a nice garden, healthy kids,” he says.
“How similar are we to them?”
“Zone of Interest” was the term used by the Nazis for the 40 square kilometer area around Auschwitz. The film is based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same title.
The film earned rave reviews, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it “a bone-chilling Holocaust drama like no other,” and Variety praising it as “deep, meditative and profound.”
However, some criticized Glazer for not showing Auschwitz itself, the largest Nazi concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, lost their lives according to the site’s museum. (AFP/Z-3)
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