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Winner: Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 2023
Winner: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay & Best Non-English Language Film, Boston Society of Film Critics 2023
In German & Polish w/English subtitles
Master of portraiture Jonathan Glazer (UNDER THE SKIN, Screening Series 2014) was awarded the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for THE ZONE OF INTEREST, adapted from a 2014 novel of the same title by Martin Amis. The film centers on the domestic life of Hedwig (Sandra Hüller; ANATOMY OF A FALL, Fall Focus 2023) and Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), beneficiaries of lebensraum, whose family home—nestled between train tracks and gas chambers—is spitting distance from Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp located in occupied Poland, where Rudolf serves as commandant.
Towards the final days of the Holocaust, Hedwig is fixated on self-preservation, while Rudolf is increasingly burdened by his duties. We reside inside the family’s encampment, with background voices of ghost-like prisoners muffled by the perpetrator’s quotidian musings. At one point, Hedwig and her atrocious friends joke about their new luxury goods, received from Canada—the nickname of the storage facilities where such items, after being confiscated, were stored—at the demise of their former neighbors.
Shot on location, THE ZONE OF INTEREST weds banal and overt acts of evil with unforgettable reminders of resistance (it was shot in monochrome by thermal-imaging cameras). And just as we can’t take any more, the film gives a crushing nod to Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING (IFFBoston 2013). Hauntingly scored by Mica Levi and shot by Łukasz Żal (COLD WAR, Fall Focus 2018), this film will stay with you for a lifetime, for better or for worse.
—Dorota Lech, Toronto International Film Festival guide
“a blood-freezing treatise on the banality of evil”
—BBC
“brilliantly conceived… it will stay with you long after it’s done”
—Esquire
“a stone cold masterpiece”
—The Guardian
“one of the 21st century’s most monumental and significant pieces of cinema”
—IGN