chevdenz dagney stephanos
Magdalena Liendo
The Zone of Interest begins on a lovely afternoon somewhere in the Polish countryside. A husband and wife are enjoying a picnic on the banks of a river with their five children; they eat lunch and then splash around in the sunshine. It all looks so peaceful, so inviting. But something seems strangely amiss once the family returns home.
They live in a beautiful villa with an enormous garden, a greenhouse and a small swimming pool. But before long, odd details intrude into the frame, like the long concrete wall, edged with barbed wire, and the ominous-looking buildings behind it. And almost every scene is underscored by a low, unceasing metallic drone, which sometimes mixes with the sounds of human screams, dog barks and gunshots.
It's 1943, and this family lives next door to Auschwitz. The husband, played by a chillingly calm Christian Friedel, is the camp commandant Rudolf Hss, who's remembered now as the man who made Auschwitz the single most efficient killing machine during the Holocaust.
But director Jonathan Glazer never brings us inside the camp or depicts any of the atrocities we're used to seeing in movies about the subject. Instead, he grounds his story in the quotidian rhythms of the Hsses' life, observing them over several months as they go about their routine while a massive machinery of death grinds away next door.
We see their children go off to school or play in the garden, and some of their more violent roughhousing suggests they know what's going on around them. At night, the fiery smoke from the crematorium chimneys sends a hazy orange light into the bedroom windows; this is a movie that makes you wonder, quite literally, how these people managed to sleep at night.
Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, shot the movie on location near the camp, in a meticulous replica of the Hsses' real house. They used tiny cameras that were so well hidden the actors couldn't see them; as a result, much of what we see has the eerie quality of surveillance footage, observing the characters from an almost clinical remove.
In its icy precision, Glazer's movie reminded me of the Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films, like Cach and The White Ribbon, are often about the violence simmering beneath well-maintained domestic surfaces. It also plays like a companion-piece to Glazer's brilliant 2013 sci-fi thriller, Under the Skin, which was also, in its way, about the total absence of empathy.
Here I should note that The Zone of Interest was loosely adapted from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis, which featured multiple subplots and characters, including a Jewish prisoner inside the camp. But Glazer has pared nearly all this away, to extraordinarily powerful effect. He's clearly thought a lot about the ethics of Holocaust representation, and he has no interest in staging or re-creating what we've already seen countless times before. What he leaves us with is a void, a sense of the terrible nothingness that the banality of evil has left behind.
Eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust, over half of whom were Jewish, and over a million of whom were children. Filmmakers have captured the tragedy of this time, as well as the rare moments of humanity that shone through the darkness, with movies that capture the day-to-day hopelessness of the camps, the brutal and lifelong trauma endured by survivors and the perseverance of the human spirit.
Michael is a law student observing a trial of female Nazi guards and is shocked to see that an older woman with whom he had affair during his teen years is one of the accused. During their time together, Hanna had often asked him to read to her, and he deduces a secret that could help her in the trial, but opts to stay quiet. What unfolds is a story of the failings of humans: what some must do in order to survive, the impact of a lack of education and the ways in which we justify our wrongs and then search for absolution in the face of our own guilt.
In Belarus, the parents of the Bielski brothers (Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber, Jamie Bell and George MacKay) are killed by Nazi task forces; the four men escape to the forest, vowing revenge. They discover fellow Jews in hiding, and form a camp, scavenging for food and moving around to avoid discovery by German police. Over the course of years, the brothers and their recruits battle harsh winters, sickness, inter-fighting and the constant fear of being discovered. In this fact-based story, there are casualties; however, the brothers persevere to form a colony in the forest, successfully sheltering about 1200 Jews.
Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, concentration camp prisoners tasked with herding other prisoners to the gas chambers and cleaning up afterwards. One day, Saul witnesses a Nazi doctor suffocate a boy who is still alive following a gassing. Saul, convinced the boy is his child, is determined to give the boy a proper Jewish burial, and sets out to do all he can to protect the body. A gripping tale of hopelessness and despair, this Hungarian film earned many accolades, including Best Picture awards from both the Academy and the Golden Globes.
What more can be said about the young Jewish girl who lived in hiding, fearing for her life and the lives of her family members and friends, but also eloquently wrote of hope and belief in the kindness of man? This adaptation of her firsthand account of the events surrounding the Holocaust is considered to be the finest adaptation of her diary, with Millie Perkins giving a poignant portrayal of the inspirational girl, and Shelley Winters winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a fellow Jew in hiding.
Based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the film depicts the five-year struggle of the Warsaw pianist to survive following the Nazi invasion of his country. Szpilman and his family are forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, and are eventually separated. Szpilman later aids a Jewish revolt, eventually escaping and basically doing what he can to survive by relying on others to hide him and supply him with food. The film was nominated for seven Oscars, with wins for its screenplay, director Roman Polanski and Best Actor for Brody.
There are so many small, picturesque towns in Kentucky that would make great backdrops for films. I sing their praises all the time. And more and more filmmakers are heading to the Bluegrass State for that very reason.
But I'm a proponent of getting out of Hollywood for location shooting ANYWHERE. When I watch movies, authenticity is a major factor in my enjoyment of the film. Also, if you're lucky, you can sneak a peek at actors doing there thing in your own backyard.
Is you live in southern Indiana, Columbus isn't that far a drive, being centrally located almost halfway between Indianapolis and Louisville. And that's where film crews are shooting a new movie based on a true story about the Holocaust. It's called The Ice Cream Man. And the main reason is because of a 123-year-old ice cream parlor--the Zaharakos Ice Cream Parlor and Museum.
I applaud Zaharakos for being exactly what a place like that SHOULD be--a MUSEUM as well as an ice cream parlor. Certainly, if you've been in business for more than 100 years and have maintained that early-19th-century appearance, patrons are going to want more than an awesome chocolate sundae.
The Ice Cream Man director Robert Moniot literally went globetrotting searching for the perfect location for this film; just last year he was in Europe, New York, and Los Angeles. But nothing satisfied him until he did a very specific Google search and Zaharakos was the first item that popped up. Moniot was so enamored of the place that he got a hold of its then-owner Tony Morovec and got him to close the parlor for a week so he could film.
The actual ice cream man of the title was the Jewish owner of an ice cream parlor in in Amsterdam in the early 1940s. His name was Ernst Cahn, and he was a resistance fighter who led an uprising called The February Strike against the Nazis. Cahn was executed in 1941. He's being played by Noah Emmerich, whose list of credits is enormous--The Americans, The Truman Show, and Super 8 are a fraction of his work.
This isn't the first time Hollywood has come to Columbus. South Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada filmed a movie called...wait for it...Columbus and used a lot of downtown locations in the 18 days it took to shoot the movie.
90f70e40cf