‘The Zone of Interest’ Producer Addresses the ‘Selective Empathy’ Toward Israel and Gaza

The timing of The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s study of one of the most notorious architects of the Holocaust, was unnerving: The film came out around the same time that the Israel-Hamas war broke out in Gaza. Now, producer James Wilson has addressed the parallels between the film and current events.

“What seems so stark is that we have an empathy that is selective,” Wilson told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview about The Zone of Interest, when asked about the obvious parallels. “There are groups of people, innocent people, [whom we care for their] safety and grieve and mourn when they’re killed. There are other innocent people to whom similar or the same things are happening that we seem not to care about as much. […] It doesn’t seem to me that complicated to condemn both losses of innocent life—on a basic human empathetic level, there just seems to be the sort of extraordinary empathy dissonance.”

On October 7 2023, Hamas militants murdered 1,200 Israelis and took 240 people hostage. In response, Israel has launched an all-out assault on the Gaza Strip, killing almost 30,000 people and displacing most of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. With most of Gaza’s hospitals bombed and Israel preventing U.N. aid trucks from entering the territory, Palestinian civilians—including children—are already dying of starvation, disease, and injuries from Israel’s strikes. Last month, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must take measures to avoid committing genocide in Gaza. As of this writing, 130 Israeli hostages are still in captivity in Gaza.

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, tells the story of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. While the audience listens to the sounds of Jews and other prisoners being murdered and cremated in the camp, Höss and his family enjoy an idyllic life with servants, a garden, and frequent outings to the nearby river. The film forces viewers to acknowledge their own complicity in atrocities, enjoying their daily life while the unthinkable happens on the other side of the wall.

(featured image: A24)