The Zone of Interest

Winner of 2 Academy Awards including Best International Feature Film and Best Sound (nominated for 5 awards).

Master of portraiture Jonathan Glazer (“Under the Skin”) was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and two Academy Awards for “The Zone of Interest,” adapted from a 2014 novel of the same title by Martin Amis. The film centers on the domestic life of Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), beneficiaries of lebensraum, whose family home — nestled between train tracks and gas chambers — is spitting distance from Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp located in occupied Poland, where Rudolf serves as commandant.

Towards the final days of the Holocaust, Hedwig is fixated on self-preservation, while Rudolf is increasingly burdened by his duties. We reside inside the family’s encampment, with background voices of ghost-like prisoners muffled by the perpetrator’s quotidian musings.

Shot on location, the film weds banal and overt acts of evil with unforgettable reminders of resistance. This film will stay with you for a lifetime, for better or for worse. (Synopsis from the Toronto International Film Festival 2023 Program Guide)

In German with English subtitles.

Post-film discussion on Saturday night (March 16th) with Amos N. Guiora, a prolific author and prominent lecturer/speaker both in the United States and Europe on issues related to complicity, enablers, bystanders, the Holocaust, national security, limits of interrogation, religion and terrorism, the limits of power, multiculturalism, and human rights. Dr. Guiora is a Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, the University of Utah, is actively involved in bystander legislation efforts in Utah and other states around the country and leads the Bystander Initiative, which focuses on the role of bystanders and enablers in sexual assaults.

“More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, ‘The Zone of Interest’ leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.” ~ Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

IMDb Info