Elham Asaad Buaras
A British filmmaker used his Oscar acceptance speech to call for an end to his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.”
Glazer Jonathan’s German-language film about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, “The Zone of Interest,” won the best international film award. Glazer said those killed in both Israel and Gaza were victims of “dehumanisation.”.
Celebrities, including singer Billie Eilish, also wore pins calling for a ceasefire. The awards ceremony started slightly later than planned on March 10 after pro-Palestinian protesters blocked traffic outside the venue.
Approximately 1,000 protestors demonstrated outside the Dolby Theatre. Protesters blocked a stream of limousines that were making their way to the venue, forcing some celebrities—such as Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon—to get out of their cars.
The film, which earned a total of five Oscar nominations, focuses on the family of Auschwitz’s longest-serving commandant, Rudolf Höss.
Höss ran the Auschwitz concentration camp between 1940 and 1943. An estimated 1.1 million people were murdered there, one million of whom were Jews.
Taking to the stage with producer James Wilson, who has made a series of speeches cautioning against selective empathy, Glazer said that when making the film, the pair had been eager to make its story as contemporary as possible.
After thanking those who worked with him on the film, Glazer, reading from a pre-written speech, said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather what we do now.
“Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present.”
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?”
“I think what’s inside this film is what we do to each other as human beings,” he said.
“We see others as less than ourselves, different from ourselves. Somehow, step by step, that leads to atrocity.”
Director Ava DuVernay, Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish, and actors Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, and Mahershala Ali were among the celebrities wearing a pin on the red carpet calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The pin-wearing followed an open letter to US President Joe Biden signed by nearly 400 artists. Some of the signatories include Bradley Cooper and America Ferrera, who were both nominated for awards this year.
Some 1,200 people were killed after Hamas gunmen attacked communities in southern Israel on October 7. They took around 250 hostages back into the Gaza Strip, with many still alive and being held there.
Israel responded with a massive bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which it said would destroy Hamas. More than 30,900 people have been killed in Gaza since then, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry says.
The United Nations has warned that famine in the Gaza Strip is “almost inevitable” and children are starving to death.
