Director Jonathan Glazer returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, where he shot elements of his Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, on February 15 for the Polish premiere of his acclaimed and Oscar-nominated film.
After the screening alongside museum director Piotr Cywiński, producer Jim Wilson, producers Ewa Puszczyńska and Bartek Rainski and production designer Chris Oddy, the director explained to the audience what it meant to have been allowed inside the museum – on the site of the concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were murdered during WWII – to shoot scenes for the feature.
Glazer added: “But rather we were trying to show it as something still in our world and still in ourselves as human beings and not an anomaly or some event that happened once and couldn’t possibly happen again. It felt very important to tell a story about our human capacity for violence.”
“The Zone of Interest,” which bowed in competition in Cannes where it won the Grand Prix, follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the architect and commandant of Auschwitz, juxtaposing his seemingly blissful family life alongside his wife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) against the backdrop of one of history’s darkest chapters.
