The Zone of Interest (2023) and Palestine

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

It is scary how easily we distance ourselves from the atrocities of the past. We attribute the inhumane and unjust to the attitudes of a bygone era, while operating off of the belief that such terrible events would not happen in the modern day. The Zone of Interest displays the truth through a frightening yet sobering reality; Man is capable of a disgusting ugliness when motivated by self-interest.

The film operates within a vignette of an Auschwitz commandant's household, where conversations about garden upkeep and approvals for mass crematoriums warrant the same level of casual nonchalance, and where the fumes coming from the crematoriums are directly visible from a beautiful garden.

The general indifference displayed by the characters towards the massacre occurring just mere meters away from them echoes the sentiments toward the Palestinian genocide occurring today.

In other depictions of the Holocaust, we see horrific imagery of the slaughters, yet here Glazer opts to never show any of the cruelty on screen. The horror lies not just within how little the family cares about the treatment of those in the camps, but the manner in which they display it. They dehumanise and debase with the bat of an eyelid, they grow plants over the encampment walls not out of a desire to hide from shame but out of boredom and a lack of interest. They exist within a vacuum free from guilt and commit the gravest and most depraved of acts not out of an intentional hatred but because of the culture they have fostered.

Whether intentional or not, The Zone of Interest serves as an indictment of the way people act in the face of a despicable cruelty. In another 80 years, what will they say about how we handled the events of today? How will we have distanced ourselves from the genocide? 

Originally posted on Letterboxd on 27th February, 2024