Hot off of winning a pair of Oscars this past Sunday, Jonathan Glazer’s horrifying Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” will make its streaming debut on Max on April 5.
Winner of the Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound as well as the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, “The Zone of Interest” stars Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, with Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller as his wife, Hedwig.
Without showing any of the Nazis’ genocidal actions, “The Zone of Interest” follows the Höss family as they go about their daily lives right next door to the concentration camp, as the sounds of gunfire, gas chambers and furnaces can be heard while Hedwig tends to her garden and her children play in the backyard.
“The Zone of Interest” received critical acclaim for its depiction of the banality of evil and was also nominated at the Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.
In his acceptance speech for Best International Feature, Glazer connected the dehumanization depicted in his film to that which has been seen in the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7 and the subsequent occupation of Palestine by Israeli military, which has led to the deaths of thousands of Gazans.
“All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer said. “Not to say ‘Look what they did then’ — rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our 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,” he continued. “Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
