The Holocaust film The Zone of Interest is currently in the Oscar race for Best Picture. Director Steven Spielberg highlights the uncompromising masterpiece.
With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg has made one of the best and most important films about the Holocaust. The 200-minute historical film tells the story of one of the darkest chapters in human history in black and white images. Spielberg recently told the Hollywood Reporter that Schindler’s List is the film in his six-decade career that he is most proud of. According to the director, a current work is now set to build on this quality.
Over 30 years after Schindler’s List: Steven Spielberg is quite enthusiastic about Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
In the same interview, Spielberg also talks about another Holocaust film that made a big impression on him: The Zone of Interest, the latest work by exceptional British director Jonathan Glazer.
Spielberg says:
The Zone of Interest is the best Holocaust movie I’ve seen since my own. It’s very good at raising awareness, especially of the banality of evil.
The Zone of Interest is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp and tells the story of camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). He lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and his children in a house with an idyllic garden – directly in front of the walls of the extermination camp. We never see what is going on behind them
Here you can watch the trailer for The Zone of Interest:
The Zone of Interest is no ordinary historical movie. Glazer described his approach with the provocative words “Big Brother in a Nazi house”, as The Guardian notes. What he means by this is that we observe the everyday lives of the Nazi characters. Only the background noises reveal the true horror.
At times, the movie feels like jumping from one fixed surveillance camera to the next. The staging is experimental and leans into elements of horror cinema. Basically, every new image in The Zone of Interest prompts us to question exactly what we are seeing – and what we are not seeing.
