Jake Paltrow On ‘June Zero’, His Film Set In Early 1960s Israel During Adolf Eichmann’s Final Days – “A Very Large History, But From A Very Small Lens”
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In 1961, a key architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was tried in Israel and sentenced to death. An odd thing happened. Officials didn’t want to bury him and risk creating a shrine, so they decided on cremation. That is strictly against the Jewish religion and there were no crematoria in the country.
So Shlomi Zebco (played by Tzahi Grad), a former Israeli paramilitary soldier who owns a commercial oven factory, was asked by the government to make one big enough to incinerate Hitler’s former top lieutenant, handing him a manual with instructions – in German. Zebco’s assistant realized with horror the model was used in Nazi death camps.
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The story is told from three points of view: of a 13-year-old Jewish Libyan boy who is kicked out of school, finds a job at the factory and helps build the oven; Eichmann’s guard, a Moroccan Jew tasked with keeping the Nazi alive until his execution, neurotically seeing threats to his charge’s life everywhere; and a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who served as the chief interrogator at the trial.
Eichmann himself is seen in glimpses and only from the back. The film starts with the news his death sentence. Paltrow said the trial itself had been explored many times already. He and co-writer Tom Shovel chose to tell the story through the experiences of peripheral characters, leaving Eichmann a figure to be gathered around, reacted to and managed, but not understood.
June Zero is the date printed on the execution issue of a tabloid magazine, an attempt by the editors at an anti-commemoration.
The film, shot in Israel and Ukraine, screened at Karlovy Vary in 2022, Film At Lincoln Center’s New York Jewish Film Festival and other fests. It opened at the Quad in NYC this weekend and will expanding in coming weeks.
In a conversation with Deadline, the director says the detail about the oven was something he had read. “And I followed that thread. I went to Israel … and found a researcher there to help me try to get in touch with some of these living participants. And we did a series of interviews [and] they are very compelling.”
“I had gone to Israel with an idea of a more fictionalized version of what this story was and through these interviews, I really found that there is a much bigger thing underneath. This idea of history and through these characters we could formulate something about people who want to be a part of it, reject it, and, sort of, are it … It was something much more complex than I think I had realized.”
He said he wasn’t “particularly looking to do a movie that took place in Israel or a Jewish-themed movie, but I was very struck by the story. As the pieces came together, you know, they are full of contradiction and irony. The story of executing this principal architect of the final solution and then, for political and legal reasons, deciding to incinerate his body but in a culture and religion with no cremation … So now you employ people who don’t really know how to do this, but have an acumen for these kinds of things. The shortest distance between A an Z is to kind of go by the plans of the crematorium made by the company that made them for Auschwitz.
“For me, those are inherently dramatic things.”
The boy, David Saada,, played by 11–year-old Noam Ovadia in his first film role, appears nowhere in the history books. He’s shown in a last scene as a middle-aged man trying to convince a Wikipedia editor not to keep removing his name from a landing page on the topic of Eichemann’s death. David “is very much based on an older man who has this claim … somebody who is claiming to be a part of the history, but is, in fact, not believed.”
Ovadia is fantastic. “From the beginning, we knew if we didn’t find the right David, we wouldn’t have a movie,” Paltrow says. “He had a very natural quality when reciting written dialogue and an instinctual ability to access his emotions.”
Tom Hagi (Micha Aaronson) centers a story that takes place in Poland and is based on survivor Miki Goldman, who is still alive at 90. Paltrow said the two are close and Goldman’s son Ron ended up being one of June Zero’s producers.
Eichmann’s guard Haim Gouri (Yoav Levi) was chosen for that duty for his Moroccan Jewish heritage as European Jews were Hitler’s prime targets.
Paltrow has said Jacques Becker’s Le Trou was a guide for creating a group of characters that are very different from one another, but bond over their concentration on a single task (in that movie it’s digging a hole to escape prison) as David finds his footing in a world of men at the oven factory.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentaries and particularly Shoah inspired the writers’ approach. “Lanzmann’s spirit loomed so large over our process we dedicated the movie to him,” Paltrow says.
Paltrow’s narrative fiction films are Young Ones and The Good Night. He co-directed the documentary De Palma with Noah Baumbach. He’s also directed for TV including Boardwalk Empire and Halt and Catch Fire.
Shoval is a director and scriptwriter of TV and film, including Youth, which won the Best Film award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in 2013.
June Zero‘s release comes amid the ongoing, highly polarizing war in Gaza. Asked about then, and now, Patrow says he hopes “that these ideas, and these themes from the movie, as they emerge, especially … right now, during the war, that people who may have a knee jerk reaction to the subject matter, where they wouldn’t see it, or in fact, maybe even would boycott it, you know, that they could maybe stay a little bit more open … And there may be things in his movie that merge with some of their ideas, but also that they could maybe think about it in a slightly different way.
“You know, the movie is told in a manner and written in a manner that is, hopes to be, empathetic to the characters. Because at the end of the day, we’re getting to a very large history, but from a very small lens. And I think that’s very much also the way we live our lives day to day.”