The Zone of Interest film Sandra Hüller Auschwitz, Digi Mart USA News: ZDF is broadcasting the drama “The Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glazer on Monday evening at 10:15 p.m. as its German free-TV premiere.
The film will also be available on the ZDF streaming service for four weeks.
The British-American-Polish production had its world premiere at Cannes in 2023. At the 2024 Oscars it received five nominations and won two awards, for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound.
Glazer also wrote the screenplay, inspired by the novel of the same name by Martin Amis.
The film centers on Rudolf Höß, played by Christian Friedel, commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who was responsible for implementing the “Final Solution,” the extermination of European Jews. He lives with his wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller, their children and household staff in a house with a large garden that sits directly against the camp wall.
Hedwig’s mother, played by Imogen Kogge, visits her daughter in occupied Poland and remarks how lovely it is there. The family appears happy, and Rudolf calls his wife the “Queen of Auschwitz.” Occasionally the idyll is disturbed by bones and ash floating in the river and fires burning at night.
The situation becomes serious for Hedwig when her husband faces a transfer to Oranienburg in Brandenburg. She is unwilling to give up her small paradise beside the camp wall and asks Rudolf to insist on remaining in Auschwitz when he speaks to Hitler himself.
Glazer does not show the interior of the camp. The camera rarely and only incidentally looks over the wall.
Instead, the film stays with the daily life of the Höß family, though gunshots and screams on the soundtrack make the horror impossible to ignore. At the end, a visual epilogue moves to the present and shows scenes from the memorial site at Auschwitz-Birkenau today.
In a 2024 interview with spot on news, Sandra Hüller described how consistently this concept was applied on set. Ten cameras ran continuously in the house, producing 800 hours of material.
“All the cameras were constantly recording something. We just didn’t know what or what the frame would be.” Johnnie Burn and his team were responsible for the soundtrack, on which shots and screams from the camp intrude on family life.
Hüller said Glazer calls this sound-driven layer the “second film.” She said that when she first watched it, she noticed “that it works.”
Hüller said she did not initially find the role appealing. She was not interested in “embodying fascist-minded people,” she said, and deliberately did no psychological work on the character.
“I did not go to bed that night as Hedwig Höß.” Her interest lay in a larger question: whether all of us accept great suffering of others for our own comfort. About the historical Hedwig Höß, she said: “Frankly, she is fairly irrelevant to me.”
The real figures behind the film family took separate paths after the war. Rudolf Höß was handed over to Poland and tried in court there.
In 1947 he was hanged in front of his former house in Auschwitz. Hedwig Höß and the children lived in West Germany after the war ended.
