‘The Zone of Interest,’ ‘The Settlers’ Score Fipresci Awards at Cannes

variety.com:

Marta Balaga Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has scored a Fipresci award in Cannes. The jury of the International Federation of Film Critics praised the film “for its formal radicality, the complexity of the sound and score, and its contrast between the invisible atrocities behind the wall and a supposed paradise,” Fipresci stated on Saturday.  “By presenting the horror as something usual, and using everyday-like dialogues, it’s a reflection on ignorance as a disease that connects the past with the present.” Glazer’s take on a Nazi family living next door to Auschwitz and enjoying it – loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, who tragically passed away on May 19, just before the premiere – has been getting rave reviews at the French festival, becoming one of the frontrunners for this year’s Palme d’Or.

Christian Friedel stars as real-life SS officer Rudolf Höss, joined by Sandra Hüller playing his wife, Hedwig. “It’s a remarkable film – chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope,” wrote Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable.

Yet it does so with a bracing originality.” A co-production between U.S., U.K. and Poland – with House Productions, Film4 and Extreme Emotions on board – “The Zone of Interest” is an A24 release.

Paweł Pawlikowski’s regular collaborator Łukasz Żal lensed the film, while Mica Levi was responsible for the unnerving soundtrack, called by Gleiberman “eerie in the extreme.” Glazer is also behind “Sexy Beast,” “Birth” and, more recently, 2013 sci-fi curio starring Scarlett Johansson, “Under the Skin.” Venturing