Shot in lush super 16mm, Jake Paltrow’s “June Zero” takes a unique look back at the execution of Adolf Eichmann after his trial in Israel during the early 1960s. Told in a triptych, the film follows 13-year-old Libyan immigrant David (Noam Ovadia), who claims to have worked on the oven where Eichmann’s corpse was incinerated. Hayim (Yoav Levi, “Zero Dark Thirty”), a Moroccan guard assigned to Eichmann’s jail cell, and Micha (Tom Hagi), a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who became the chief interrogator at the trial.
Though seemingly disparate characters, these three are inexorably connected through the parts they played in this moment in history. By looking at history from the point of view of those in the periphery, Paltrow accomplishes both telling the story of Eichmann’s trial and execution from multiple unseen angles but also highlights the diaspora of Jewishness found in Israel at the time.
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Despite being Jewish, David and his family find themselves discriminated against for their Libyan heritage. His father gets him a job at a factory, hoping it will help his son have a shot at a real future in their new country. Ovadia is a wondrous discovery. A natural talent like Salvatore Cascio in “Cinema Paradiso,” he is all raw energy and unpolished charm. Unfortunately, the film does him a bit of a disservice, introducing him as a thief and ending with him overpowering a schoolyard bully with a punch learned from his boss at the factory. His family’s immigrant story is never really fleshed out, nor are they shown as much more than the cliches those around them have labeled them.
The most frantic section comes as the film follows Hayim, a Moroccan guard in charge of Eichmann’s cell. Shot like a paranoid thriller, Levi goes almost too broad at times as his frenzied paranoia grows. Tasked with keeping the tabloids at bay and making sure no one takes vengeance into their own hands – only non-European Jews are allowed in the prison for this reason – he sees danger at every corner. Editor Ayelet Gil Efrat’s frenetic cutting has shades of Hitchcock to it, creating one of the most tense haircut scenes in perhaps all of cinema.
The best third of them shifts from Israel to Poland, though shot in Ukraine, where Micha has returned to visit the ghetto for the first time since his escape from Auschwitz and immigration to Israel. Borrowed from the real-life story of survivor Miki Goldman, Hagi brings a bittersweet melancholy as he recalls the story to a group from the Jewish Agency of how he was whipped by a Nazi 81 times yet still found the strength to flee for his life. The camera pans across the ghetto, showing the empty spaces where once there was life.
It’s a harrowing sequence, made all the more poignant later when Ada (Joy Rieger) from the agency tells him she feels he’s being used for his movies. That they are making him repeat them as a performance, here Hagi gives a heartrending monologue about arriving at an immigration checkpoint, a gaunt face telling a tale of human cruelty so unfathomable that he was told it must be a fable. For him, history must be retold over and over by those who lived it, fossils as he calls himself, so that it may be believed and never again regarded as fable.
Although the changes in tone don’t always work, and the third segment towers over the rest of the film, there is something to be said for filmmakers willing to approach history as something malleable. Something that we all have a different approach toward and feeling about: that is what “June Zero” is about at its core. How history is recorded, how it is recounted, how it is shared, and most of all how it is lived through. There is no one strand of history, no one side to it, yet somewhere amongst all the stories and threads and angles there is a semblance of truth if we’re willing to seek it. [C+]
