OLD AND BUSTED: The Zone of Interest.
The New Hotness? The Zone of Moral Equivalence: Will Hollywood’s Relative Silence On Gaza Continue At The Oscars?
The reluctance to publicly broach what’s happening in Gaza is also highly noticeable in a year when there are multiple awards contenders that grapple with moral quandaries about war, genocide and the selective ways that history memorializes these, including Best Picture nominees “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “The Zone of Interest.” When developing awards campaigns for movies, publicists and strategists often tout the timeliness and relevance of a film (regardless of whether those labels truly apply). It’s not hard to imagine connecting each of those historical movies to the present. The connections are right in front of us.
Only “The Zone of Interest” has admirably made that connection. At the BAFTA Awards in mid-February, producer James Wilson gave one of the few acceptance speeches this season that has explicitly mentioned Gaza, drawing a direct parallel with the themes of the film. The haunting and unsettling movie depicts the daily routines of a Nazi commandant and his family, living a life of comfort and privilege while overseeing the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp literally next door to their capacious home.
“A friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind,” Wilson said in his acceptance speech for Best Film Not in the English Language. “Those walls aren’t new, from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen, in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol [in Ukraine] or in Israel … or anywhere else in the world. And thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”
If “The Zone of Interest” wins the Oscar for International Feature Film as expected, hopefully Wilson and others behind the movie will choose to reiterate those sentiments. It would be a meaningful moment — and a welcome break from the silence.
Having made a massively overrated critically praised film on the Holocaust, its producer then turns around and blames the Jews for fighting back after 10/7. Vanessa Redgrave smiles.
UPDATE: Zone of Interest wins best international film Oscar; Glazer goes full Vanessa Redgrave in his acceptance speech: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has lead to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”
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Jonathan Glazer made a movie about a man who builds his own professional success on his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him.
The man is immune to irony.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 11, 2024