The Zone of Interest, the German-language Holocaust drama directed by Jonathan Glazer and starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, has won the United Kingdom its first-ever Academy Award for best international feature at the Oscars 2024.
In his speech for his Cannes Grand Prix-winner, Glazer linked the film’s subject to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, where the October 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel have led the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government to launch a ground invasion into Gaza that has now left over 30,0000 Palestinians dead.
“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer told the audience, who had honored him with a standing ovation upon his win. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst.”
Glazer went on to explain how the film, which focuses on the quotidian life of the family of the Nazi commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp against the literal backdrop of the Holocaust’s worst atrocities, draws a direct line between the past and present.
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization… how do we resist?” Glazer asked.
Glazer, who is Jewish, then dedicated the film’s win to Alexandria, a 90-year-old woman he met,while working on the film and who inspired one of the key characters in The Zone of Interest. She had worked for the Polish resistance at the age of 12, leaving apples for prisoners as she cycled through Auschwitz. In the film, the scenes inspired by Alexandria’s acts of humanity are shot with thermal cameras, making the young actor recreating her noble work glow against a dark landscape; the director referred to Alexandria from the stage as “the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life.”
“She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer told The Guardian. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”
The Zone of Interest sees Friedel play Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, with Hüller playing his wife, Hedwig.
“Our emotional and political culture is closer to that of the perpetrator than we think,” The Zone of Interest producer James Wilson recently told THR. “Not in terms of wanting to kill another ethnic group, but in terms of these are the aspirations for which we are prepared not to think about who is excluded from those dreams of comfort and security. In some ways, our comfort and security might be built on the exclusion of those people.”
THR reviewer David Rooney called The Zone of Interest a “bone-chilling Holocaust drama like no other,” also writing in his review: “Loosely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, the Brit director’s fourth feature focuses on a camp commandant’s family living their bucolic dream life just over the wall from Auschwitz.”
The win marks a record. The U.K. had been nominated in the category twice before, but had never gone on to actually win the Oscar. The previous nominations were for Paul Turner’s 1993 Welsh anti-war biopic Hedd Wyn, based on the life of poet Ellis Humphrey Evans who was killed in World War I, and Paul Morrison’s 1999 forbidden love drama Solomon and Gaenor, about an Orthodox Jewish man in early 20th-century Wales who falls in love with a gentile woman.
The Zone of Interest won the international Oscar against strong competition. The other films nominated in the category were Io Capitano (Italy), Perfect Days (Japan), Society of the Snow (Spain), and The Teacher’s Lounge (Germany).
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