Director Jonathan Glazer's latest film, The Zone of Interest, is up for multiple Oscars at this weekend’s 96th Academy Awards ceremony. Set against the backdrop of World War II, the narrative centers a Nazi commandant’s family living within arms reach of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Glazer underscores the banality of the family’s daily life alongside their willing participation in an unthinkable atrocity.
More: Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer keeps committing to provocation, (The Treatment, 2024)
For his Treat, Glazer chooses Forugh Farrokhzad's 1962 documentary short, The House Is Black, which takes the viewer inside an Iranian leper colony. The camera fixes its gaze on the people with leprosy learning lessons in school, receiving medical treatment, and making music. The film is soundtracked by Farrokhzad reading her poetry as well as religious texts throughout. Glazer, who is up for Best Director for The Zone of Interest, cites Farrokhzad's commitment to capturing the raw essence of humanity. He marvels at the “searing,” unfiltered images of her depiction of human life, devoid of adornment, and stripped of any sentimentality.
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There's a film made in 1962 called The House Is Black. The House Is Black is a short film made by an Iranian poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. And it's only 20 odd minutes long, and it was basically set in a leper colony. It's like an essay, really. It's her poetry and there's also lines in the Old Testament and there's lines from the Koran in it. She was a remarkable, radical poet in Iran in the 1960s and this is, I think, the only film she ever made. So she made this film, inside a leper colony in Iran, and I think it's a hospice in fact, and she is filming the people in a leper colony with such dignity, such humanity as well.
Nothing is emphasized, there's no emotional emphasis on anything. It's a presentation of human beings who are disfigured from their illness and are living together in a community, effectively away from the rest of the world.
The beautiful thing about a camera like that is that there's no judgment in it whatsoever. It's like Nabokov's [The] Eye. It's a witness. You're bearing witness to something, and she actually adopted a child, her son, she adopted from her experience of making the film. I think everything about her and everything about that piece of work is the best of us in some way.
There's something about this film that is so coruscating, so humanist, so political that really, I can't urge you enough to see it.