The story of Adolf Eichmann’s trial has been told many times in books and movies, and if you want to see some clips of the real thing for free, YouTube awaits you. Given that this story is already well-known, it’s a credit to the imagination of writer/director Jake Paltrow and his co-screenwriter Tom Shoval that they came up with a new way to look at Eichmann, by adopting the perspectives of three disparate characters living in the newly-created state of Israel as the time of Eichmann’s execution nears.
We first meet David (Noam Ovadia), a precocious 13-year-old who emigrated from Libya with his family and is treated as second-class citizen because he’s an “Arab Jew” as opposed to the Ashkenazi Jews who run the country. Plus, there’s a belief among some that a non-European couldn’t understand the suffering of the Holocaust, even though being a Jew in Libya during and after World War II wasn’t exactly a picnic either.
David is a boy who knows how to get into trouble, primarily by stealing things to sell, and his exasperated father finally gets him a job at a machine shop in the hopes that it will keep him busy and bring in some legitimate income. The shop, run by a tough guy named Shlomi (Tzahi Grad), is working on a special project that must be kept secret—a crematory oven that will be used for the corpse of exactly one person, Adolf Eichmann (Alon Margalit, seen only obliquely). This method of disposal is partly an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, partly due to concern that if Eichmann’s body were not completely destroyed, it might become a magnet for a kind of tourism Israel definitely doesn’t want to encourage. That the workmen are following plans created by the Nazis to dispose of the bodies of Jews in the very near past (which sort of makes sense—the Germans were nothing if not efficient) is a complication that’s too much for some of the workers to handle.
The second character is Haim (Yoav Levi), a prison guard assigned to watch Eichmann and see that he doesn’t die before Israel has the chance to execute him. Like David, Haim is an outsider, in this case from Morocco, with notably darker skin than the people who give him orders. It’s not just for reasons of class that Haim and his fellow guards are not European—those in charge fear that if any Ashkenazi Jews had access to Eichmann, they’d kill him before he could be executed. Even the barber summoned to cut Eichmann’s hair is treated with extreme suspicion, to the point where he finally declares that Eichmann exerts such control over the mind of the Israelis that they’re actually his prisoners and not the other way around.
The third character is Micha (Tom Hagy), a Holocaust survivor and police investigator whose work takes him to Poland. Finding himself in the very neighborhood where he grew up sparks memories which he relates to a group of tourists, who thank him for sharing his experience. A young woman (Joy Rieger) from the Jewish Agency, however, is concerned that he’s being used as part of a plan to create a memorial out of the ghetto, cheapening the memory of the Holocaust in the process.
For most of its running time, the three stories are kept separate to the point that June Zero works more as an anthology film rather than a unified narrative. The segments, shot on 16mm by Yaron Scharf, are mostly naturalistic, with occasional flights of fancy that aren’t entirely successful, and a final coda that is definitely not necessary. In the end, June Zero is an unusual film based on an interesting idea that it doesn’t quite know how to carry out. If this film’s reach exceeds its grasp, however, it does raise interesting questions about justice and memory that will certainly be useful in sparking future discussions. | Sarah Boslaugh
June Zero is distributed on Blu-ray and DVD by Kino Lorber. The only extra on the disc is the film’s trailer.
