The Zone of Interest (2023), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, is a well made, dark, gray film, capturing daily life on the side of a wall of a concentration camp where the Camp commandant lives with his family. On the other side, the Holocaust project is underway in earnest.

You don’t actually see the gore and violence inflicted on the Jews, but the horror is ever present in the sounds, the smoke and the smog in the distance, contrasted with the the bright sun and colours, the peppy, energetic playfulness of children, and the lazy afternoon gossip of the adults on this side of the wall. The Jews’ destiny (or destination?) is dispassionately decided in meetings that discuss incinerators, layout, daily throughput and yields (of what? I don’t need to spell it out).

Career advancement comes up in terms of the number of camps (units) one oversees. The price one pays is relocating and separating from one’s family, much against the wishes of the wife (‘Talk to the Führer’, she says). Can our commandant do the job—death dealing to the Hungarian Jews, being shipped by the thousands, balancing capacity and inputting ‘raw materials’?

Everyone is affected by the goings-on differently. Even the children. Dehumanising the Jews makes it easier for the adults. There are things I may have missed in terms of symbolism but for a film that is just over 100 minutes, I think it tells a compelling story that has huge relevance to the current context of ‘othering’, and dismissing some lives as expendable based on some arbitary criteria for division and discrimination.

It is an uncomfortable watch, chilling in part, and disturbing. It prompts us to pause and reflect on how we are part of the problem in the present—through our indifference, collusion, callousness, cowardice … and also conviction.