‘We refute our Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by occupation’
The Jewish director of a film about the Holocaust was praised and cheered as he used his award acceptance speech to call for an end to the Israel-Gaza war.
British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer picked up the Best International Feature prize for the German-language movie The Zone of Interest, which is set during the Holocaust.
During his onstage speech with producer James Wilson, Glazer said the film showed “where dehumanisation leads at its worst”.
He added: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say: ‘Look what they did then,’ rather: ‘Look what we do now’.” The gripping drama follows a group of people living near the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Poland during the Second World War. The families block out the horrors nearby to lead apparently normal lives.
Glazer said when creating the film, they wanted to make it relevant to today. He added: “It shaped all of our pasts and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.
“Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation. How do we resist?” The mention of Gaza was met by loud applause from the A-list audience.
The film was also awarded at the Baftas earlier this year. During his speech there, Wilson said conflicts in Gaza and Yemen are explicitly tied to the film’s theme. “A friend wrote ... that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we chose not to look behind,” he said. “Those walls aren’t new ... it seems stark that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen, in the same way we think about innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel.”