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“All our decisions [when making the film] sought to reflect and confront us in the present.
Not to say 'Look what they did then', but 'Look what we do now'.
“Our film shows where dehumanization takes us.”
This is how Jonathan Glazer's (London, 58 years old) speech began, with the Oscar for best international film in hand for
The Zone of Interest,
the film that took the drama of Auschwitz to the last edition of the Oscars.
“Now we stand here as men who refuse to have their Judaism and the Holocaust hijacked by an occupation that has driven so many innocent people into conflict, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the attack underway on out in Gaza.”
One of the great directors of music videos of the nineties, the director of four films considered cult, the artist who has been able to convey the horror of the Nazi extermination camps in movie theaters without even a single image being seen. of victims, emerged from the Oscar gala on Sunday reinforced as a creator with his own voice, without fear or self-censorship.
More information
The Holocaust, seen through the Nazi executioners
With his speech he achieved lukewarm applause in the Dolby Theater stalls, but confirmed his idiosyncrasy: Glazer neither wants nor needs to marry anyone.
Now, beyond Los Angeles, the response has not been calm.
In Israel, despite the direct allusion, the speech has been ignored.
One of the few ministers who has responded has been that of Diaspora and Fight against Antisemitism, Amijai Chikli.
“I have no idea what the name of the useful idiot on duty who chose last night to stick a knife in the backs of his people,” he wrote one day after the Oscars on the social network X, with a photo of Glazer in Los Angeles , and described him as a “self-anti-Semitic Jew” for whom “there is no forgiveness.”
Danny Danon, a deputy from the same party, the Likud, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, considered “a shame that a Jewish director took advantage of the stage given to him to make anti-Semitic statements comparing the Holocaust with the inevitable war that was forced on us.” .
When it comes to the Oscars, those who have criticized the filmmaker the most have not been Israeli politicians, but rather Jewish organizations based in the United States.
The Anti-Defamation League stressed that “Israel does not hijack Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists,” so the speech was “factually incorrect and morally reprehensible,” while the World Jewish Congress called it “an affront to the memory of those who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust.”
An image of 'The area of interest', with the garden of the Auschwitz commandant's house and, in the background, the field.
However, all the considerations about the speech forget the final part of the thanks.
Glazer filmed right next to the Auschwitz camp (with the approval of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) in order to resurrect the atmosphere, and dedicated the Oscar to an elderly Polish woman, Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, whom he met before filming and who was part of the resistance when he was only 12 years old.
A few weeks after Glazer met her, she died.
The team filmed in her house, next to the camp wall, which she circled on her bike to leave apples (on one of those rides she found a score composed by the prisoner Joseph Wulf, who survived) for the prisoners.
Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk's bicycle and dresses appear in
The Zone of Interest,
when in a night sequence a girl is seen performing the same action: hiding food for the prisoners.
A decade with the film
Because Glazer has spent almost a decade preparing
The Zone of Interest,
a very free adaptation of the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, who saw the finished film before dying the same day the film premiered at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. Jury award.
Months later, at the San Sebastián competition, the filmmaker, in an interview with EL PAÍS, explained that as a child he was impressed by seeing images of the vandalism of Kristallnacht: “People physically like my father, my uncles , myself, appears collecting the smashed windows from the shop windows.
As a child I didn't understand what was happening, but it gave me a disturbing feeling.
And the same thing happened with pedestrians who simply watched without acting or helping.
Why this passivity?
Thus he looked for “the corner of history from which to face these events, an approach that had not emerged before on screen.”
In 2014 he read a review of the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, and without reading the book, just with the review, he asked its producer, James Wilson (who collected the Oscar with him, and who during the awards season has been quite belligerent against a certain “selective sympathy”), to buy it.
“Although the character of the commander created by Amis is fictional, I investigated real people, and that took me a long journey.”
That is why in the film the protagonists do have their real names: the Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig.
Jonathan Glazer, in the center, with the actors Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel, at the press conference last May, in Cannes, for 'The Zone of Interest'.Pascal Le Segretain / POOL (EFE)
The Londoner said in September: “Let's be honest.
No one is born as a mass murderer, but step by step passivity, wanting to be accepted, leads them to that destiny.
This escalation occurs even today,” words that have become even more relevant since last October 7, when the war broke out in Gaza.
After that talk, the filmmaker recalled a conversation with his father: “In my house the Holocaust was never clearly talked about, even though it was there,” he recalled.
“My family settled in the United Kingdom, from Ukraine and Bessarabia after the pogrom of 1903. Anyway, when my father found out that he was with this project, he told me: 'I don't know why you are doing this.
Let it rot.'
And those three words [in English
Let it rot]
provoked a quick response from me: 'I really wish it would rot, but that didn't just happen in the past.'
Scarlett Johansson, in 'Under The Skin'.
Glazer studied as a child at a Jewish school in Camden, the London neighborhood where he grew up and still lives.
His family was Reform Jewish, and as a child he signed up for the Givat Washington program, for which he spent five months in Israel, in a youth village that was a mix of high school and kibbutz.
After graduating in theater design from the University of Nottingham, he began directing trailers.
In 1993 he released three short films that paved the way for him in advertising and later in music videos.
In 1997 he won the MTV award for best music video director, and his signature is in those films for Radiohead, Nick Cave, Jamiroquai, Blur and Massive Attack.
At that moment he decided to jump into cinema, a passion inherited from his father.
An admirer of Kubrick, Glazer has only directed four films in his life:
Sexy Beast
(2003), a brutal gangster film filmed partly in Spain with Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone;
Reincarnation
(2004), with Nicole Kidman discovering the soul of her dead husband in a child;
Under The Skin
(2014), which also dedicated a decade of production and in which Scarlett Johannson plays a ruthless alien, and
The Zone of Interest,
which on Sunday won two Oscars (international film and sound).
Glazer first filmed it with the actors embodying the common life of the Höss, and later, so that it did not affect the performers, he added the noises and moans of despair caused by the machinery of the Nazi extermination camps.
In September, Glazer told El PAÍS: “I didn't want to make a piece for museums, made with a gratifying distance from the audience.
Because then you forget about the incredible capacity of human beings to commit aberrant crimes, passively or actively.
It's so easy to go towards that..."
On Sunday his intervention was simply consistent with his words.
With information from
Antonio Pita.
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