Jonathan Glazer, the director of Auschwitz-set film The Zone of Interest, won cheers and applause at the Academy Awards for a speech in which he decried the current conflict in the Middle East.
Glazer took to the stage to accept the Oscar for best international film – the first time Britain has won the prize – for his German-language, Polish-shot adaptation of the Martin Amis novel.
Taking to the stage with producer James Wilson – who has made a series of speeches cautioning against selective empathy – Glazer said that when making the film, the pair had been eager to make its story as contemporary as possible. “All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst.”
Glazer – who, like Wilson, is Jewish - continued: “Right now we 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 in Gaza.”
He finished by paying tribute to Alexandria Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, an elderly Polish woman he had met, who had worked for the Polish resistance when she was just 12.
She recounted how she had cycled to the camp to leave apples, and how she had found the mysterious piece of written music, which, it turned out, had been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner called Joseph Wulf, who survived the war. “She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer told the Observer last year.
“It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”
Her actions are recreated in the film through nighttime scenes in which a young girl is seen secretly leaving food for the prisoners. “[She] glows in the film,” said Glazer on Sunday, “as she did in life. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance.’
The Zone of Interest is the third British film to be nominated in the category (following the predominantly Welsh-language films Hedd Wyn in 1993 and Solomon & Gaenor in 2000).
It defeated a field that included Spanish-produced air crash drama Society of the Snow, directed by JA Bayona, and Japanese toilet-cleaner character study Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders. Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest’s main non-English-language rival on the awards circuit this year, was not nominated, after France’s Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée instead put forward the Juliette Binoche foodie drama The Taste of Things as the country’s submission.
Sandra Hüller, who stars in Anatomy of a Fall, appears in The Zone of Interest as Hedwig Höss, alongside Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
• This article was amended on 12 March 2024. Joseph Wulf was the name of the song composer imprisoned at Auschwitz, not “Thomas Wolf” as an earlier version said.
Read more about the 2024 Oscars:
• Here’s our news wrap and full list of winners – now read Peter Bradshaw’s verdict
• Al Pacino, British mothers and a codpiece envelope: the real winners and losers of the night
• Relive how the ceremony unfolded with our liveblog and get up to speed with the top viral moments and the best quotes of the night
• Have a gander at how the stars looked on the red carpet and at the show
