death off-camera, horror everywhere

The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “The Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glazer and “La Ferme des Bertrand” by Gilles Perret.

The area of ​​interest by Jonathan Glazer

His name is, his name was, Rudolf Höss. When Nazi Germany launched the final solution, the extermination of the Jews, this high-ranking soldier was appointed director of the Auschwitz camp. He moved in with his wife and children in a comfortable staff house with a garden, the surrounding wall of which overlooks the camp. From inside this factory of death, we will see nothing, except in the distance, a chimney with sinister smoke. Screams, gunshots, orders shouted in German: these are the only echoes that reach us.

Central character of the film, the wife of this official of terror, played by the surrealist, given the role, Sandra Hüller (the actress ofAnatomy of a fall). This wife and mother loves the house and tends to her garden. His total inhumanity, his indifference to the ongoing genocide freezes us.

Jonathan Glazer succeeds in this extraordinary story, on the side of evil, on the other side of the wall that separates us from the camp. Incredible cinema challenge, The area of ​​interest achieves his goal, which is uncomfortable for the public, but necessary, Jonathan Glazer observes more than he films his actors playing executioners, in the house, recreated near the camp, each room was equipped with remotely controlled cameras, it is as an entomologist that the filmmaker scrutinized the intimacy of the artisans of horror.

The Bertrand farm by Gilles Perret

Gilles Perret had already filmed this farm, located not far from his home in the Giffre valley, in Haute-Savoie, in 1997, for his film Three brothers for one life. A farm which was also the subject of a report, in 1972, by Marcel Trillat. Gilles Perret therefore chooses to mix all these images, to document over three periods and half a century the life of this farm and this family, but also an implicit history of French agriculture, by making the eras and the generations, the one who today has the choice to stay on the farm or not, and the one who has never asked the question.

Moving with characters who we see aging, and carried – which doesn’t spoil anything – by very beautiful images of the countryside and mountains, The Bertrand farm is a valuable document which chooses to evoke agriculture in a positive light, at this time when farmers are denouncing their working conditions and, for some, experiencing a dramatic situation.