The Zone of Interest, the harrowing Polish historical drama that examines the banality of evil on the outskirts of Auschwitz, won big at the BAFTAs on Sunday night, taking home three awards: best sound, best British film, and best film not in the English language.
Producer James Wilson, accepting the final prize, used the platform to call for an end to “selective empathy” in conflict, deliberately drawing parallels between his Holocaust film and the Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip in recent months.
“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,” Wilson said after delivering his thank-yous.
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“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,” he continued, with the room breaking into applause, “in the same way think about innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel.
“Thank you for recognizing a film that asks you to think in those spaces,” Wilson said.
The specter of the Israel-Hamas war was also raised at Sunday night’s ceremony by veteran director Ken Loach, whose drama The Old Oak was nominated for best British film. The 87-year-old and his collaborators posed on the red carpet with a sign that read “Gaza: Stop the massacre,” according to an image shared by Stop the War Coalition.
In case the message wasn’t clear, Loach’s production company then added in its own tweet: “CEASEFIRE NOW!!!”
Ahead of its winter premiere in the U.S., The Zone of Interest was screened at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8—a day after Hamas invaded Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostage. “The sickening thing about this film is it’s timely and it’s always going to be timely until we can somehow evolve out of this cycle of violence that we perpetuate as human beings,” director Jonathan Glazer told The Guardian in early December, by which time the death toll in Gaza stood at around 15,000 people.
“And when will that happen?” Glazer asked. “Not in our lifetime. Right now, it seems to be reversing and I’m mindful of that, too, in terms of the film and its complexity.”
The Zone of Interest is up for five awards at next month’s Oscars, including best picture, best director, and best international feature film.
