Just before a new conflict began between Israel and Palestine, the country's largest film festival, the Haifa International Film Festival, was held. Report.
At the very beginning of October, in the port city of Haifa, in northern Israel, it was the 39the The Haifa International Film Festival, the oldest and largest film festival in the State of Israel, is a must-attend event for industry professionals. It attracts French and Italian producers eager to do business in this small country, as well as Israeli distributors keen on foreign films. Above all, it offers a significant selection of feature films. The festival has, of course, showcased the cream of international auteur cinema, including Palme d'Or winners. Anatomies of a chute from Justine Triet to the terrible The New Boy by Warwick Thornton, with Cate Blanchett as a renegade nun, and by Jeanne duBarry, which director Maïwenn presented in several cities in Israel during the festival.
Other films had a particular resonance in this country shaped by Judaism, such as the Goldman trial by Cédric Kahn, dealing with rare finesse with the underlying antisemitism of French society in the 1970s. But above all The Zone of Interest Jonathan Glazer's chilling portrait of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, living a comfortable, bourgeois life with his wife and children in a villa just beyond the camp wall. A domestic bliss, while the screams and groans of horror unfolding on the other side of that wall can be heard constantly. In the distance, the chimney is visible, and ashes hang on the drying laundry. Grand Prix at the last Cannes Film Festival. The Zone of Interest is one of the great films about the Holocaust, alongside Shoah by Claude Lanzmann or Night and Fog by Alain Resnais. Screened in Israel, a country born from these horrors and built by the children of the deportees, this film becomes even more terrible, violent and necessary.
