Credit: British Independent Film Awards

Baftas 2024: ‘Zone of Interest’ producer urges support for victims in Gaza

Sun 18 February 2024 18:08, UK

James Wilson, the producer behind the Bafta-winning British film The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, has urged support for Gaza during his acceptance speech for the ‘Best Film Not In The English Language’ category.

Taking to the stage, Wilson started by thanking the usual studio figures before moving on to his political statement: “A friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we chose not to look behind,” he said.

Wilson’s speech continued: “Those walls aren’t new from before or during or since the holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way think about innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel”.

Continuing, he simply added, “Thank you for recognising a film that asks you to think in those spaces”.

In our three-star review of The Zone of Interest, we stated: “The Zone of Interest is naturally shocking and atrocious; there’s no denying that, but there seems to be something missing: a confident and forthright moral stance on such horrific events. Perhaps that omission of steadfast conviction, though, is intended to show that there is no credible reason for what happened at Auschwitz nor the ignorance of those who allowed it to occur. Still, Glazer seems to hesitate to believe in the strength of his story alone”.

Continuing, we added: “The effect is, as could perhaps be expected, one of complete and utter emptiness; there’s no attrition for wrong-doers, just the admission that what happened beyond Hedwig’s “paradise garden” would simultaneously become a stack of old shoes behind a glass cabinet for minimum-wage cleaners to ignore at the Auschwitz museum and a constant reminder of the sickening banality of evil”.

Having won at the Baftas, Glazer is now eyeing success at the Academy Awards, with his film going up against the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for the ‘Best Picture’ prize.

Take a look at the trailer for Glazer’s Zone of Interest below.