#Film | The Zone of Interest

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Prominent Left-Wing Jewish Writer Naomi Klein Highlighted the Relevance of the Film The Zone of Interest, Which is About the Holocaust, to “Terrorist Isra-hell's War on Gaza!”

"Everyone I know who has seen the film can think of little but Gaza," Klein wrote for a column in The Guardian last week. "The whole reason the postwar edifice of international humanitarian law was erected was so that we would have the tools to collectively identify patterns before history repeats at scale. And some of the patterns - the wall, the ghetto, the mass killing, the repeatedly stated eliminationist intent, the mass starvation, the pillaging, the joyful dehumanization, and the deliberate humiliation - are repeating."

The film's director Jonathan Glazer made headlines with his acceptance speech at last Sunday's Academy Awards, in which he said: "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 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza."

Naomi Klein, praising Glazer, wrote that for the director, it is not ethical "to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today".

The Zone of Interest follows the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his family as they go about their daily lives in a stately home - next to the concentration camp.

Klein noted that Glazer was "alone among the parade of wealthy and powerful speakers across the podium" at the Ceremony to mention Gaza.

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2024 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees as VHS tapes by @ShawnMansfield

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THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer

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The Zone of Interest (2023) | dir. Jonathan Glazer

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The Zone Of Interest film posters by Neil Kellerhouse

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It really is like. you don't realize until you ask other fat ppl, how common it is for a thinner person to use you as a Fat Sounding Board for their feelings about THEIR own weight.

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"The life we live is very much worth the sacrifice."

The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer

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Academy Award for Best International Feature Film:

The life we enjoy is very much worth the sacrifice.

The Zone of Interest (United Kingdom - 2023, dir. Jonathan Glazer)

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the zone of interest (2023)

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The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer

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The Zone of Interest (2023) Directed by Jonathan Glazer

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⋆˚｡⋆ The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer⋆˚｡⋆ ⋆

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Recently Viewed: The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest is a horror film.

That isn’t a “genre” classification, by the way; the movie lacks the “traditional” tropes and conventions commonly associated with the most narrow, stringent application of that (often reductive) label, which tends to conjure images of ghosts, ghouls, and machete-wielding maniacs. Still, the intent of the story is to terrify the audience—it simply accomplishes this goal through subtler means than, say, Friday the 13th or The Evil Dead. There is, for example, little explicit bloodshed; the atrocities occur almost entirely offscreen. Yet “implication” doesn’t dull the impact of the violence; on the contrary, it somehow feels more confrontational (albeit less exploitative) than outright showing mass graves and gallons of gore.

The narrative revolves around a series of chilling juxtapositions. Seemingly ordinary family meals and joyful birthday celebrations, for instance, are lent a sinister tone by virtue of the fact that the patriarch wears the uniform of a high-ranking SS officer. The mother, meanwhile, tends her garden, taking great pride in the colorful, fragrant flowers and bountiful vegetables; she then casually mentions that she hopes her plants and crops will eventually obscure the drab, dreary concrete wall at the rear of the property—a barrier that borders Auschwitz. Indeed, the protagonists literally live in the shadow of the notorious death camp. They dress themselves in clothing and jewelry confiscated from the Jewish prisoners; the eldest son has even made a hobby of collecting discarded gold teeth and dental plates. At night, the father stands on the back porch, enjoying a cigar as he watches the black smoke billowing above the crematorium chimneys—the perverse epitome of a professional admiring a “job well done.” The household servants—local girls hired from the nearby village—dutifully clear the silverware, scrub the floors, and polish the master’s boots, constantly tormented by the knowledge that their very survival depends upon the “benevolence” of their employers.

Director Jonathan Glazer observes the action with an unnervingly cold detachment. The predominantly static camera and rigidly symmetrical framing are reminiscent of the works of Roy Andersson and Chantal Akerman. This deliberately mundane, undramatic visual style emphasizes the inherent humanity of the subjects: they’re Nazis, yes, but they’re also people—a somewhat clichéd theme that nevertheless remains relevant and resonant. Anybody, after all, is capable of choosing evil; we must therefore be vigilant, lest we become history’s next monster.

Thus, The Zone of Interest is objective in its presentation, but not nonjudgmental. And that is a vital distinction.

[everythingmaxriemelt]

Films I like in 2024 (some weren’t released in 2024 and I haven’t seen most of the newer films in other Best of 2024 lists)

So, in no particular order:

1. Anora (dir. Sean Baker, 2024)

2. All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2023)

3. Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders, 2023)

4. The Teachers’ Lounge/Das Lehrerzimmer (dir. Ilker Çatak, 2023)

5. Conclave (dir. Edward Berger, 2024)

6. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne, 2023)

7. The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

8. Two to One/Zwei zu Eins (dir. Natja Brunckhorst, 2024)

9. Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass, 2024)

10. Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Other films I like in 2024:

- Janet Planet (dir. Annie Baker, 2024)

- Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2023)

- BlackBerry (dir. Matthew Johnson, 2023)

- The Taste of Things (dir. Tran Anh Hung, 2023)

- Godzilla Minus One (dir. Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

- Monster (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2023)

- His Three Daughters (dir. Azazel Jacobs, 2024)