The Zone of Interest (2023)

Never managed to finish The Piano, but love The Pianist. Terrific movie.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Oops! Thanks for straightening that out.

It was actually a co production between New Zealand and Australia.
It’s ok. Nothing great

Au contraire, mon ami! It was a co-production between New Zealand, Australia, and France, and it won the Palme d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, making Campion the first female director to receive the award.

This thread has descended into error ridden farce (mostly on my part). I love the film the Piano. I have not see The Pianist. The Piano teacher is also a great film everyone should check out. Yay for pianos.

Funny you mention this — I just rewatched Poor Things and strangely the very minimal piano scene brought The Piano Teacher to mind. I haven’t seen it for about fifteen years. *gulp*

Overdue a rewatch.

I haven’t seen this yet, but I aim to. I also don’t plan to shame anyone who doesn’t feel up to watching it quite yet due to perceived subject matter. I get it.
I also think these are the kind of films we shouldn’t avoid for long, either though. That period of time wasn’t something we should ever feel comfortable with, so these “reminders” as they are, shouldn’t be ignored.

I’m watching Radu Jude’s The Exit of the Trains, which a 3 hour documentary about the massacre of Jews in Romania the night of June 29, 1941. Some were executed. Some died en route to a camp, on what was referred to as The Death Train.

It’s told mostly in imagers of photos of victims and their family members explaining, often in harrowing detail what happened to them.
Powerful stuff.

I heard an interview with Jonathan Glazer saying that the thermal imaging sequences with the girl leaving food were based on his conversations with a woman who had lived in the area at the time and was a member of the Polish resistance as a teenager, so based on real events.

Never heard of this & it’s now in my watchlist.

Romania - what a backward country. Never even knew they had an “army”.

Currently one of the countries that badly mistreats animals. To put it mildly.

If they didn’t know, why is Hedwig so hostile to the help? Her mother actually wondered aloud if her former employer, whom she used to clean for, is in the camp. She was pissed because someone else outbid her on the poor woman’s curtains.

https://www.screendaily.com/features...188230.article

Amazed that Glazer made a movie in a language he didn’t understand. (Unlike the Napoleon movie in which he had an American accent.)

I’ve seen that reasoning. As I said earlier in the thread, I just feel like it’s a bit more nuanced than that. There’s ‘knowing’ in the abstract and then there’s knowing full well in granular detail. I don’t feel like there’s a clear logic to the mother suddenly leaving otherwise if everyone is 100% aware. But I could be off base (wouldn’t be the first time for me).

Yeah....all that. I grew up around some old folks who were actually there, though Berga and not Auschwitz. Nobody wanted to talk about it, especially to the kids, but we figured it out anyway and saw some of the documentary film. Parental reassurance mainly was, "that will never happen here". I also had a college history prof, an accented German who grew up in the midst of that and gave us a stern lecture about how it was ALL true. When I saw this (the movie, that is), I realized that some of the family footage in the movie version seemed to be processed to look like 1940's color film. I've seen, years ago, some actual documentary footage of domestic scenes in that place, and the resemblance was chilling.

I found myself not really watching for the plot and characters, but just wanting to get out of the theater, really ambivalent about watching something like this for a Friday night dinner-and-a-movie.

It was obviously the mother’s first-time visit. She knew what was going on there (hence her remark about her former employer), but she had never heard the sounds before or saw the smoke & ash.

Fair enough.