re: Zone of interest is great

My wife and a friend saw it at our local cinema here in Bavaria. There were 7 people in the audience. I went the next evening and there were also 7 there. The couple next to me left - the woman crying - during the part where the young girl was playing the piano. You have to stay through the credits for the score. I was the last one in the theater, and just sat there for a few minutes, not overwhelmed, but extremely moved. It stays with you a few days, that's for sure. Haunting is the perfect description of this movie. The reactions in Germany have been very "positive". Kind of strange it was directed by an Englishman, but maybe it was better that way.

The sound engineer spent a year compiling a sound library for the film, and it really paid off. One of the best uses of sound I've ever heard; it was a perfect mix of sound and absence of sound.

Sandra Hüller, who played the wife, was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for "Anatomy of a Fall" this year.

I'm really "happy" to read y'all's reactions from America. I was wondering what kind of reviews it would get over there.

One of the more interesting things about the movie is how they filmed so many of the scenes simultaneously throughout the movie with reality tv style cameras to make it feel like you're truly a fly on the wall watching this family. So scenes like the little boy playing on the drum while the mother was showing her mother the girls' room, that was actually being filmed in real time. Just an interesting layer of filmmaking choice I thought.

I kinda want to see this, but I fear that it would be just way too depressing.

My wife was born and raised in East Germany, so I've experienced the whole spectrum of Germans at their best and worst. My neighbor, a really nice old guy, was 16 in the Spring of 1945 when the Americans (including the Band of Brothers) got to this town. Shortly before, an American bomber was shot down right outside the town. My neighbor was nearby and went and pulled the survivors out of the wreckage. He got shot and wounded for his trouble. The war was effectively over, and people knew the Americans would be there very soon, so some of them hung white flags from their windows - they were hanged from the lampposts on the bridge down the street. I've got lots of stories like that, but I'll stop hijacking here...

Damn your neighbor is 95? And you mean they were hung by the nazis by putting white flags up?

I'm sorry, I didn't phrase that right. He died awhile back, I think in his late 70's or early 80's. The townspeople who put out the white flags were hanged by diehard loyalist nazis (using ropes, not the flags). Post-war Germany was a very, very hard time, though in Bavaria they weren't starving so much, as it was an agricultural area. It was also in the American zone, so they had it better here. There were like 4 or 5 "work camps" in the immediate area where the prisoners were basically worked to death and fed poorly. Lots of disease, and it gets cold in the winter...

Yes.

Went down a Wikipedia hole after watching. One of the daughters, Brigit, ended up marrying an American and lived in the US from the 1970s up until her death last year. She worked for a Jewish-owned boutique for man years.

Basically from her interview, she has a really hard time reconciling the actions of her father and his actions in the Holocaust (and with the Holocaust in general...she seems to have had some doubts) with the father who she saw at home every day.