Jonathan Glazer, the director of the Auschwitz and Holocaust set-film The Zone of Interest, drew cheers and applause at the 2024 Academy Award for his accepting speech for Best International Film, in which he decried the current conflict in the Middle East.
Glazer took to the stage to accept the Oscar – the first time Britain has won the prize – for his German-language, Polish-shot adaptation of the Martin Amis novel.
Taking to the stage with producer James Wilson – who has made a series of speeches cautioning against selective empathy – Glazer said that when making the pic, the pair had been eager to make its story as contemporary as possible.
“All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst,” he noted.
Glazer – who, like Wilson, is Jewish - added: “Right now 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 October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”
He finished by dedicating the movie to the memory of an elderly Polish woman he had met called Alexandria, who had worked for the Polish resistance at the age of 12 and had cycled to the camp to leave apples.
She recounted how she had found the mysterious piece of written music, which, it turned out, had been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner called Thomas Wolf, who survived the war.
“She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer told the Observer last year.
“It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”
The Zone of Interest is the third British film to be nominated in the category following the Welsh-language films Hedd Wyn in 1993 and Solomon & Gaenor in 2000.
It defeated a field that included the Spanish-produced air crash drama "Society of the Snow", directed by JA Bayona, and the Japanese toilet-cleaner character study "Perfect Days", directed by Wim Wenders.
"Anatomy of a Fall" was Zone of Interest’s main non-English-language rival on the awards circuit this year, but was not nominated after France’s Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée instead put forward the Juliette Binoche foodie drama The Taste of Things as the country’s submission.
Sandra Hüller, who stars in Anatomy of a Fall, appears in "The Zone of Interest" as Hedwig Höss, alongside Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
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