Last night I had the opportunity to attend a preview of a film that has been on the international festival circuit for about half a year, but whose commercial release will only take place in the coming weeks. The fact that the film begins screening in the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) is no coincidence. ‘June Zero‘, the film directed by the American Jake Paltrow (brother of …) and written by him together with the Israeli screenwriter and director Tom Shoval, is not only a film about the Holocaust but rather about the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society. The story takes place in 1961, in the final days of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the only individual sentenced to death in the history of Israel, the one whom Hanna Arendt characterized as a prototype of the “banality of evil”. The choice of this symbolic moment by the two screenwriters is very relevant. It was a moment in history that marked not only the trial and punishment of a war criminal, but also the confrontation of the young state and of the whole world with the history and the suffering of the survivors, many of whom were still living at that time. It is a subject that, paradoxically, has been little addressed by Israeli cinema until now.
Adolf Eichmann is never seen in ‘June Zero‘. Denied of his human dimension, he is in fact an abstraction of the Evil that the other protagonists must face. His guards are selected from among those who did not directly suffer the consequences of Nazi policy, themselves or their families. His death sentence and execution present the authorities with unexpected problems: how to prevent the murderer’s grave from becoming a monument to his followers? In order to implement the decision to cremate him and throw the ashes into the sea, an oven needs to be built, as human cremation is not practiced in the Jewish religion and in Israel. An oven built by the survivors of Auschwitz. This unusual situation brings together a group of unusual characters: Eichmann’s guard whose main task is to protect his life until the execution of the sentence, a metal factory owner receiving the order to manufacture the furnace, an investigator who survived the ghettos and death camps, a teenage apprentice who will mature in the middle of this story receiving a lesson in life and history.
The first part of the film, which I found the most successful, is told from the perspective of David, a teenager from a family of immigrants from Libya, who faces the difficulties of adapting to life in a new country and the prejudices of an administration and of a school system that disadvantages Jewish newcomers from Arab countries. The rendering of the period is meticulous and the director’s decision to use analogue shooting on 16mm film adds to the sense of authenticity. (the processing was done in laboratories in Romania). I think the film would have benefited if it kept this line, because there is a parallelism between the adolescent’s coming to age, of his learning of the facts and understanding their significance, and the way in which the young State of Israel was confronted with the colossal dimensions of the horror and the traumas of the survivors who arrived in the Promised Land. Unfortunately, this narrative thread is broken. There follows an episode detached from the rest of the story, in which one of the investigators is confronted with the places of his torments – the ghetto where he survived torture and witnessed death and suffering. The explanation of the need to witness is poignant, but detached from the rest of the narrative. The story then returns to the final days of the execution and what followed after the execution, for a final episode to put everything into a present-day context that is not without surprises.
We are dealing in ‘June Zero‘ with some outstanding acting creations. Young debutant Noam Ovadia fills the screen and I can only wish him a career worthy of this role. Tzahi Grad impresses as the factory owner. Tom Hagi and Ami Smolartchik are moving in two roles of survivors, each bearing in his own way the burden of suffering and survival. The main problem with the film seemed to me to be the lack of narrative coherence in the script. Many, too many important themes are addressed: the young country’s confrontation with the trauma of immigrants who went through the Holocaust, the internal conflict between the survivors’ silence and the need to tell for future generations, the relations between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic sectors of Israeli society, human reactions in the face of absolute evil. Each of these themes could be the subject of a film or several. As they are all put together they risk canceling each other out or going unnoticed. Some aspects are charged with emotion, others are treated somewhat schematically and cartoonishly, but that is somewhat in the Israeli film tradition. The lack of narrative consistency and thematic focus detract from the cinematic effect of a film that could have been memorable.
The preview I attended was attended by co-writer Tom Shoval. Of the 25 or so spectators who watched the film, about 15 remained for the discussion that followed. That didn’t stop opinions from being diverse and polarized, and discussions from being heated. The Holocaust remains a topical issue for Israelis, linked not only to great history but also to the personal and family histories of many of us. The debates sparked by such films and commemorations will continue for a long time.