The Tree of the Knowledge: Cinematic Visions of Good and Evil — A Lenten Film Series

Friday evenings in Lent, RSVP to join us for the return of Lenten Movie Nights!

Following a vegetarian meal (for those abstaining from meat on Fridays), we’ll engage with a curated series of films both classic and contemporary. This year, based on suggestions and responses to last years’ cinematic excursion, our series is based around this theme—The Tree of the Knowledge: Cinematic Visions of Good and Evil.

Our Lenten Film series concludes on Friday, March 21 with the winner of the Best international Feature Film of the 96th Academy Awards: The Zone of Interest. The film is directed by Jonathan Glazer and is adapted from a novel by Martin Amis.Last week with No Country for Old Men, we considered how goodness, beset on all sides by patterns of violence and seemingly overwhelmed by them, could possibly prevail against those patterns without being caught up in them. This week, we wonder together how it can be that these evil patterns can become so familiar that we become complicit in them; how it is that our complicity in violence, scapegoating, and death can lead us not only to excuse them, but champion them as good, see them as necessary, diligently labor for their perpetuation, and be commended for our work.

In The Zone of Interest,the Commandant of Auschwitz and his family live what appears to be an idyllic life in a home that abuts the walls of the death camp. On the other side of the wall: an un-glimpsed, unfathomable horror. But the family love their beautiful home. German film critic Hanns-Georg Rodek writes of the film, “It concentrates in one garden the attitude of an entire nation that wanted to know nothing.”

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