Auschwitz drama ‘The Zone of Interest’ gets six-minute Cannes applause

Jonathan Glazer just delivered the first instant sensation of the Cannes Film Festival. ‘The Zone of Interest’, the English director’s fourth feature film after ‘Sexy Beast’, ‘Birth’ and ‘Under the Skin’, earned a six-minute standing ovation following its world premiere, reports ‘Variety’. This has been the most rapturous response at Cannes so far.

Glazer’s film is austere and challenging as it tells the story of the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, who have created their dream home directly next to the concentration camp.

The constant screams of prisoners, gun shots and smoke from the gas chambers haunt their paradise, but their indifference to such horrors creates a terrifying and sinister juxtaposition, ‘Variety’ notes.

Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, ‘Variety’ says ‘The Zone of Interest’ tells the story of Rudolf Hoss, a Nazi commandant who designed and built Auschwitz. It also looks at his relationship with his wife Hedwig, as they create their dream life directly next door to the concentration camp.

In crafting a portrait of the Holocaust, Glazer says he conducted an “enormous amount of research” to capture the divide between the Hoss family’s mundane domestic dramas and Auschwitz, which lies on the other side of the garden walls.

The director described an intention to capture “the capacity within each of us for violence, wherever you are from”. In the case of ‘The Zone of Interest’, that meant portraying Nazis as people and not as stereotypical monsters.

Auschwitz drama ‘The Zone of Interest’ gets six-minute Cannes applause

“The great crime and tragedy is that human beings did this to other human beings,” Glazer said, according to ‘Variety’. “It’s very convenient to distance ourselves from them as much as we can, because we think we don’t behave that way, but we should be less certain than that.”

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