After waiting nearly a decade for his Birth follow-up, the startling, striking sci-fi drama Under the Skin, the wait for Jonathan Glazer’s next film has also been an extended one. We finally got the first details on the project about a 15 months ago, when he revealed he would be exploring “the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit” of the Holocaust, or “how it would be possible to stand by and watch that.”
While a 2019 shoot was originally rumored, it now looks production has been pushed to 2020, but today brings a promising update. Deadline reports that A24, Film4, Access Entertainment, and You Were Never Really Here producer James Wilson and Cold War producer Ewa Puszczyńska have all banded together to back the film. Set to shoot in Poland starting next year, the source of inspiration for the film is Martin Amis’s Auschwitz-set novel The Zone of Interest.
As The Guardian reports, “The Zone of Interest of the title is Kat Zet, as the concentration camp in the novel is called (KZ being shorthand for Konzentrationslager). The events of the story unfold from three narrative standpoints – Angelus “Golo” Thomsen, the hero (his name cribbed from historian Golo Mann), Paul Doll, the commandant of the camp, and Szmul, head of the Sonderkommando (prisoners who were charged with disposing of bodies, “the crows of the charnel house”).”
No other details have been revealed thus far, but we can expect those three characters to lead the film, though casting–nor a title–has yet to be determined, so check back for updates as we get them. With production beginning next year, expect this to arrive in 2021 at the earliest.