The Zone of Interest - 5 nominations

 

• 
  • Best International Feature Film

  • United Kingdom
• 
  • Best Sound

  • Tarn Willers 
  • Johnnie Burn
• 
  • Best Motion Picture of the Year

  • James Wilson
• 
  • Best Achievement in Directing

  • Jonathan Glazer
• 
  • Best Adapted Screenplay

  • Jonathan Glazer

Have you ever watched a Holocaust film without crying? Yeah, me neither. Until I saw The Zone of Interest. This is the most ordinary film - it's about a family, the dad has a prestigious job, they go on vacations, they tend their garden, they give birthday presents. Every now and then, someone stops by to deliver a bag of goodies from which everyone in the household including the domestic workers gets to pick an item - you know, a fur coat, some nice shoes, some lovely pieces of clothing.  Sometimes there's a black cloud or fire in the backdrop, but what a beautiful home for this little family to enjoy. 

But this family lives next door to Auschwitz, and the father is Rudolf Hoss, the architect of the horrific concentration camp apparatus, where his wife has built a magnificent life and celebrates their home without irony. She loves being called "the Queen of Auschwitz," and she worries more about her flowers than the terror being perpetrated at her feet by her husband.

This film is haunting for its normalcy. When Hoss talks about "promotions at work," he is talking about the Third Reich and not some widget company. There are some nauseating moments when he admits that at a party he likes to go to the balcony and calculate how he would gas everyone in the room to their deaths - because it's just another part of his job, and he is an overachiever. Ordinary. Normal. In this film, it's the ordinary that screams at you, it's the normalcy that violates your soul.  It reminds us moment after moment that monsters are just heroes in their own stories, just folks working a day for money. 

Glazer's brilliant direction and screenplay put a mirror in our faces.  And what do we make ordinary now? What comments do we laugh off? What steps toward fascism do we dismiss? What have WE normalized? The only way we learn from the past is to yell and scream and rant that things that are horrific are NOT normal. And may the memories of the souls who perished at Hoss' hands, along with so many others, forever and always be a blessing.