László Nemes, the director of acclaimed film Son of Saul, has criticised The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech.
Speaking at the ceremony on Sunday, Glazer said he and his producer, James Wilson, “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
Glazer’s words have met with both applause and opprobrium, including from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who on Monday called them “morally reprehensible”.
The ADL posted on social media: “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the #Oscars are both factually incorrect & morally reprehensible. They minimise the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”
This sentiment was echoed by Nemes, who – like Glazer – won the foreign language Oscar for a film about the Holocaust; in Nemes’ case his 2015 movie Son of Saul, about a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
“The Zone of Interest is an important movie,” Nemes writes. “It is not made in a usual way. It questions the grammar of cinema. Its director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust.
“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
Nemes continued by saying Glazer’s speech would stoke antisemitic feeling. “It is especially troubling in an age where we are reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred – this time, in a trendy, ‘progressive’ way,” he wrote. “Today, the only form of discrimination not only tolerated but also encouraged is antisemitism.”
The Guardian has contacted Glazer for comment.
Son of Saul and The Zone of Interest both premiered at Cannes, eight years apart. They both won the the grand prix (the runner-up’s prize) at the festival, and both are set at Auschwitz in 1944.
The former focuses on a Sonderkommando prisoner Saul, seemingly numbed as he goes about his work. As word of an uprising spreads, Saul becomes driven by a mission to perform a proper Jewish burial for a young boy who was not incinerated. The film tracks Saul’s experience throughout, with its star centre-screen for much of the movie, the horrors around him slightly blurred in the periphery of the frame.
The Zone of Interest takes place largely just outside Auschwitz’s walls, in the domestic paradise created by SS commandant Rudolph Höss, along with his wife, Hedwig. The prisoners are unrepresented in the film, other than through the soundtrack which captures their cries and screams and industrial grindings of the death camp next door.
Nemes relates this artistic choice to focus on the perpetrators rather than the victims to Glazer’s speech. “[M]aybe it all makes sense, ironically,” he says, “there is absolutely no Jewish presence on screen in The Zone of Interest. Let us all be shocked by the Holocaust, safely in the past, and not see how the world might eventually, one day, finish Hitler’s job - in the name of progress and endless good.”
Glazer and Wilson had been “circling around” the idea of doing a Holocaust film for some years before they optioned Martin Amis’s novel – a heavily fictionalised account of the Hösses’ lives – in 2014.
“When Jon and I started, back in 2014, to talk about this, about making a film on this subject,” Wilson told the Hollywood Reporter, “we of course knew Schindler’s List and Son of Saul and everything in between. And our conversations were all about, ‘What new is there to say about the Holocaust?’ Except that it was evil, which everyone knows and which felt like a straw target.”
Glazer added: “But because the subject is so vast and because of the sensitivities involved, I felt I first needed to educate myself in a deeper way. So I spent a couple of years just reading books on the subject, watching documentaries, reading eye-witness testimony. Trying to understand the impulses that drew me to the subject to begin with, before I even tried to put pen to paper.”
It was during this research he came across an excerpt from Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest, which was about to be published. “I didn’t know whether I wanted to adapt the book, but I knew there was something in the book for me,” he said.
Nemes, who was born in Budapest and has lived in Paris, London and New York but remains based in Hungary, suggested Glazer’s words at the Oscars were symptomatic of a world view or “maybe even a collective psychosis” common to “totalitarian political regimes and repressive religious fanaticism”.
He likened such a standpoint to that of “12th-century archbishops, in an ecstatic state of self-righteousness, self-flagellation, denouncing vice, longing for purity.”
Nemes suggested Glazer was part of “the overclass of Hollywood” who “preach to the world about morality” rather than concerning themselves with crises in their own industry.
Rather than concentrating on their jobs, Nemes continues, “the disconnected, hypocritical and spoiled members of the cinema elite are busy - for some reason - trying to moralise us.”
On Friday, Danny Cohen, the film’s executive producer, said he ‘just fundamentally disagree[d]” with Glazer’s comments.
“It’s really important to recognise [these comments have] upset a lot of people and a lot of people feel upset and angry about it” said Cohen on the Unholy podcast. “And I understand that anger frankly.”
Cohen said: “I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this. My support for Israel is unwavering. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organisation which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that.”
The producer said that he believed the speech was a collaboration between Glazer and Wilson.
In previous podium appearances, Wilson has made political statements, while Glazer has tended to restrict himself to thanking his crew and backers. Financier Len Blavatnik – who was also on stage with the pair – was likely unaware of what the director would say. Blavatnik is yet to publicly comment on the speech.
László Nemes’s statement in full
It is strange when the overclass of Hollywood preaches to the world about morality, instead of worrying about the sorry state of cinema, the crashing level of craft and artistry in films, the destruction of creative and artistic freedom by corporate mindset or the conquest of pyramid-scheme streaming services producing junk cinema. When they should aspire, in a world more and more fragmented and drawn to its own destruction, to create meaningful movies, the disconnected, hypocritical and spoiled members of the cinema elite are busy – for some reason – trying to moralise us.
And this is reflected in their productions, uninspired and academic, cowardly and never challenging. They all act in unison according to a worldview that reminds me of 12th-century archbishops, in an ecstatic state of self-righteousness, self-flagellation, denouncing vice, longing for purity. Only totalitarian political regimes and repressive religious fanaticism are defined by this kind of state of mind or maybe even collective psychosis.
The Zone of Interest is an important movie. It is not made in a usual way. It questions the grammar of cinema. Its director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust. Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.
It is especially troubling in an age where we are reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred – this time, in a trendy, “progressive” way. Today, the only form of discrimination not only tolerated but also encouraged is antisemitism. But maybe it all makes sense, ironically – there is absolutely no Jewish presence on screen in The Zone of Interest.
Let us all be shocked by the Holocaust, safely in the past, and not see how the world might eventually, one day, finish Hitler’s job – in the name of progress and endless good.
