The director of a film in competition at Cannes about the happy domestic life of the commander of the Auschwitz death camp said the story is about “the capacity for violence in all of us”.

At the press conference for “The area of ​​interest” which premiered on Friday, British director Jonathan Glazer said he had considered making a Holocaust film for many years, but only understood the story he wanted to tell. after his visit to Auschwitz a few years ago.

“When we started the movie, I wasn’t sure what movie we were going to make, what perspective it would be from,” he said.

But then he visited the camp where 1 million European Jews were gassed and cremated, and another 150,000 also murdered.

“It started to evolve from my own journey, this visit,” Glazer said. “The house and the garden in which the commander lived… Its proximity to the camp was breathtaking. It penetrated me.

This led to the extraordinary “The Zone of Interest”, which strictly limits its look to the happy family life – four children, dogs, picnics, gardening, tea parties and bedtime stories – that Rudolf Hoss and his family appreciated.

Only a brick wall separates them from the mass murder taking place a stone’s throw away, which Hoss oversees. Their garden is fertilized with human ash. Hoss brings home personal items from the victims for his wife and staff to enjoy.

The horror is unspoken and the death machine remains in the distance as the background noise of gunfire, dogs and human screams. The crematory chimney burns brightly all night – but merely as a backdrop.

“I hope the movie we made is – it tries to talk about the capacity for violence in all of us. Trying to show these people as people. Not like monsters,” Glazer said.

He added: “I was trying to speak to the present tense in this film. It’s presented with a degree of urgency and alarm.

“The big crime is that human beings did this to other human beings. It’s convenient to distance yourself – but I think we should be less sure than that.

We asked actress Sandra Huller what it was like to play a Nazi woman.

“Of course I felt responsible as a German to play this woman,” she said. “There really wasn’t a way to get it right. It was never about being good about something. It had to do with being present, listening and respecting the people around us.

The film will be distributed in December by A24.

Discover the Cannes magazine of TheWrap here and all our Cannes 2023 coverage here.