Overview

• 'The Zone of Interest', an Oscar-nominated film, depicts the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, living just outside the concentration camp.
• The film does not directly show the horrors of Auschwitz, instead using distant sounds of gunshots and screams, and the family's indifference to them, to hint at the atrocities.
• Production designer Chris Oddy meticulously recreated the Höss family home and garden based on historical records and photographs, with the set constructed on location in Poland, next to Auschwitz.
• The film uses hidden cameras and natural lighting to avoid aestheticising the Holocaust, and presents familiar Holocaust images in unsettling ways.
• The film underscores how walls, borders or geographic distance compartmentalise the suffering of others, enabling genocide.