The film co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, ”The Zone of Interest", directed by Jonathan Glazer, has won the Grand Prix in the Main Competition at the International Film Festival in Cannes. The award for this British-Polish co-production was awarded by a nine-member jury chaired by Swedish director Ruben Östlund. The Polish producer of the film is Ewa Puszczyńska (Extreme Emotions Bis). The picture also received the FIPRESCI award.

The film "The Zone of Interest" was considered among the favourites already from the get go. The ceremonial world premiere, which took place on the evening of May 19th, ended with a seven-minute standing ovation. Among the celebrated creators - in addition to the director and producers, attending was the General Director of the Polish Film Institute Radosław Śmigulski, as well as the Polish team including: Łukasz Żal (DoP), Joanna Kuś (set design), Waldemar Pokromski (make-up), Małgorzata Karpiuk (costumes), Małgorzata Bereźnicka (production manager, Extreme Emotions Bis), Bartek Raiński (co-producer) and Stanisław Cuske (camera operator).

The world's media praised the film in the first articles published right after the premiere in Cannes- among them significant magazines and industry news outlets mentioning a few: “Overwhelmed” was the term used by the author of an article in The Hollywood Reporter about the premiere screening of the film in Cannes. "Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust Anti-Drama is a chilling look at the banality of evil," writes Indiewire. “Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time” states Vanity Fair. ”Yes, Holocaust movies are virtually a genre of their own, but I can safely say I have never seen one, sans any visuals of violence and suffering, that still manages to be just as harrowing and frightening, maybe even more. The Zone of Interest takes its place among the great films made on the Holocaust and will probably haunt you long after seeing it.”  continued Deadline. Variety, on the other hand, reads: ”It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.”

"Zone of Interest" was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute and the A24 studio and it was shot entirely in Poland with mostly Polish crew. The British producer of the film is James Wilson (Two Wolves Films), and on the Polish side is producer Ewa Puszczyńska (Extreme Emotions Bis) well known for her previous productions such as the award-winning films: ”Ida" or "Cold War".

We send our greatest congratulations to the producers, the cast and crew of Zone of Interest. And we hope to see more of such successful Polish co-productions in the future.