The Zone of Interest

Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, lives with his wife and children in a well-kept house and garden pressed against the camp wall. The film stays with the family's ordinary routines, the pool, the flowers, the promotions, while the sounds and smoke of the machinery of murder are constant and unremarked just beyond the fence.

The film lays bare the psychic mechanics of not-knowing, the everyday capacity to wall off atrocity and carry on with domestic life beside it. For a clinician it is a study of denial and dissociation practised on a monstrous scale by people who consider themselves ordinary. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2023 and is based on the novel The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis.