Zone of interest

In The Zone of Interests, British director Jonathan Glazer looks at the domestic idyll of Nazi Germany. Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and four children and a dog live in a spacious, pedantically clean house with a manicured garden and a greenhouse. They celebrate family dinners, dream of a holiday in their beloved Italy. On weekends, they like to go kayaking or take a walk in the woods with friends. However, disturbing noises and sometimes desperate screams often come from behind the walls of their house, because Rudolf Höss is the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The Zone of Interest is a crippling study of the banality of evil, in which we never witness genocide or camp reality. Everything violent that one wants to look away from is pushed out of Rudolf and Hedwig's house, hermetically sealed outside their everyday lives. The family idyll is only occasionally disturbed by smoke from nearby camp chimneys. Is it possible to arrange for yourself a sterile paradise in the shadow of someone else's hell, so that its traces do not penetrate into consciousness and conscience?

The film by Jonathan Glazer, creator of Under the Skin and the cult music videos Massive Attack and Radiohead, is a Polish co-production, for which — on the Polish side — was responsible Ewa Puszczyńska, producer of Ida and the Cold War. The Zone of Interest is an outstanding, entirely made in Poland, innovative reinterpretation of the cinema of the Holocaust, awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar in the category of Best International Film and Best Sound. The music is directed by Mica Levi, and the cinematographer is Oscar-nominated Łukasz Żal (Cold War, Ida). It is a deeply moving, eye-opening work that goes beyond the framework of film — and will go down in the history of cinema.