“The Zone of Interest” premieres at the 61st New York Film Festival on October 8 following its world premiere at Cannes in May and appearances in Telluride and Toronto this fall. A24 will open the film on December 8, and it will represent the UK for Best International Feature at the upcoming Oscars. Will this NYFF selection be the latest international art house success to cross over into top categories?
Movies about World War II and the Holocaust are fairly common at the Oscars (“Schindler’s List,” “Life is Beautiful,” “The Reader,” etc.), but “Zone of Interest” takes an unconventional approach. Director Jonathan Glazer used surveillance-style cameras to film multiple scenes simultaneously and achieve a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the everyday lives of a Nazi family living just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film doesn’t dramatize the atrocities taking place in the camp. The horror comes from the background noises and images that suggest the violence taking place while Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife and children enjoy their idyllic home, unbothered. We see how easy it is to participate in a genocide when it’s happening just out of sight.
It’s undoubtedly a tough sit, and its chilly tone might make it a tough sell for some audiences — there’s no one in it to sympathize with, really — but the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive: 95 out of 100 on MetaCritic and 95% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes. And for the past decade the motion picture academy has been expanding its membership to achieve more gender, ethnic and international diversity, and we’ve seen that reflected in more Oscar nominations for films not in the English language, like Best Picture nominees “Roma” (2018), “Minari” (2020), “Drive My Car” (2021) and “All Quiet on the Western Front” (2022), plus Best Picture winner “Parasite” (2019).
International filmmakers have also made strides in Best Director. Consider the surprise nominations for Pawel Pawlikowski (“Cold War”) and Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”). The Swedish Ruben Ostlund also beat the odds to be nominated for the English-language “Triangle of Sadness.” The British Glazer could join that list for the German-language “Zone.” Indeed, our odds as of this writing favor “Zone” for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay noms. Will it keep the international art house streak alive?
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
