The Zone of Interest filming locations: was Oscar-nominated movie filmed at Auschwitz concentration camp?

The Zone of Interest, a German language drama film, follows Nazi concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they live outside the walls of Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.

The film has been nominated for the Oscar Best Picture, as well as for Best International Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Sound. It is one of few drama movies to be shot around the grounds of the infamous concentration and death camp to which around 1.1 million Jews were deported, and where roughly 1 million of them were murdered.

Permission to film within the camp itself is strictly limited, as the are now serves as a museum and testimony to the horrors of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews, as well as millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners, and other groups were killed.

Where was Zone of Interest filmed?

The real Höss house has been privately owned since the end of the Second World War, and production designers instead converted a derelict property outside the main camp grounds into a replica of the Höss home.

Production took place for 55 days in the summer of 2021 in the Polish town of Oświęcim, where Auschwitz is located. In January 2022 filming also took place in Jelenia Góra in the south west of Poland.

Because of the film’s focus on the perspective of the Höss family life, the atrocities occurring inside the concentration camp are not seen in the film, they are only heard, juxtaposing the quiet nature of life outside the camp.

Therefore filming did not take place inside the grounds of Auschwitz itself, although buildings from the camp complex are often seen in the background.

The film’s director Jonathan Glazer described the sounds from the camp heard in Zone of Interest as ‘the other film’ - the noises heard by the Höss family are based on historical accounts of what happened at the camp, including gunfire, cries of pain, the stomping of jackboots, and the working of the crematoria.

Which films have been shot at Auschwitz?

Permission for filming at Auschwitz is hard to secure, especially on the grounds of the actual death camp complex, and is usually reserved for documentaries, but in rare cases drama films have been filmed there.

One of the best known films about the Holocaust is 1994 Oscar Best Picture winner Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg. Polish authorities gave Spielberg permission to film on the grounds of the camp museum, but the World Jewish Congress objected. 

The film crew instead created a replica of the concentration camp, using the real camp as the blueprint, and filmed the movie outside the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

2016 biopic Denial, starring Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall, about the Deborah Lipstadt’s libel case levelled by Holocaust denier David Irving, was also partly filmed at the site of the concentration camp.

Documentaries filmed at Auschwitz include Claude Lanzmann's epic 9.5 hour 1985 project Shoah, and 1998 film about the deportation of Hungarian Jews, The Last Days.