The Grand Prize for The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, the enfant terrible of British cinema

It was our Palme d'Or. In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer adapts Martin Amis' novel set in Auschwitz in his relentless and chilling way. The film depicts the daily life of a family of Nazis housed right next to the camp and indifferent to horror. At the end of the garden, death is signaled by screams and industrial noises. The banality of evil in all its horror. The 58-year-old director has just been awarded the Grand Prix. The fourth feature film in a career that began twenty-three years ago, it was the Briton's first appearance at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jonathan Glazer cultivates a remarkable sense of suspense and marketing. Before Cannes, we only knew that The Zone of Interest was inspired by the novel by Martin Amis, who has just died. "I was offered a casting without telling me for which film," actress Sandra Hüller told us at Cannes. We don't have that taste for secrecy in Germany so it was obvious that it was a foreign director. I first read three or four pages without knowing exactly what it was about. I then learned that Jonathan Glazer was behind this project and that he was talking about the Höss family. »

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The Zone of Interest is an A24 production, the American studio behind the cream of auteur cinema (Uncut Gems, Lady Bird by Greta Gerwig, First Cow, The Whale, Everything Everywhere All at Once). Contrary to custom, it did not show The Zone of Interest to distributors before Cannes. Bac Films bought it for more than a million euros blindly, without reading the script or seeing the film, on the name and reputation of its author. A screening the day before Cannes allowed them to reassure themselves about the investment.

The first part of Jonathan Glazer's career was devoted to directing commercials (Levi's) and music videos (Radiohead, Blur). Moved to cinema in 2000, Jonathan Glazer never tells simple stories. Sexy Beast, in 2000, put two gangsters back to back in the tense atmosphere of a villa on the Spanish coast. "I liked his commercials and music videos for which he received many international awards," said Ben Kinglsey in 2001, who played one of the two characters. Jonathan has style, a universe of his own. »

Universe that expanded in 2004 with Birth. A fantastic tale à la Rosemary's Baby, co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, in which Nicole Kidman crosses the ghost of her late husband reincarnated as a ten-year-old boy... Psychological ambiguity mixed with the supernatural. In 2013, Jonathan Glazer made his mark with Under the Skin, unveiled at the Venice Film Festival, where Scarlett Johansson played a vengeful and sexy alien on the streets of Edinburgh. Between this highly stylized genre film and The Zone of Interest, the director had not shot anything, except an installation at the Coachella festival in 2011 and a hallucinatory short film, in 2019, The Fall. After his Grand Prix award, his next film should arouse even greater expectations.