It’s been a remarkable period for French courtroom dramas in the cinema. Films like Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall or Alice Diop’s highly acclaimed Saint Omer have reinvigorated the genre. Now we can add to that list The Goldman Case, an absorbing new film from director Cédric Kahn that dramatises a trial that gripped France in 1976.

The defendant was Pierre Goldman, the son of Polish-Jewish refugee parents, who were both resistance fighters and hardline communists.

Cédric Kahn at the Greek Film Festival, in Athens, earlier this year Photo: Aristidis Vafeiadakis/ZUMA Press Wire

Imprisoned in 1974 for the murder of two women in a Paris pharmacy five years earlier, Goldman appeals the conviction, while admitting to multiple armed robbery charges. What’s really on trial, however, is the French judicial system’s prejudice against Jews.

Kahn, the French film-maker best known for his 2001 serial-killer portrait Roberto Succo, first discovered Goldman (played in the film by Arieh Worthalter) through his autobiography, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, written between the two trials. While Kahn gravitated towards newspaper coverage of the trial as his main source, the book was a true inspiration.

“It was both an autobiography and a creed,” says the film-maker when we meet at the annual UniFrance event in Paris to promote French cinema. “And so it was interesting to have his take on his story and how he defended the case. But also he told the story of his parents, his family. And I was fascinated by his character and by his mastery of speech.”

Antisemites at the trial in a scene from the film

The film has already been heralded in France, where it was nominated for eight César Awards – the French Oscars – including Best Film and won Best Actor for Worthalter. “I think there is an interesting evolution of the audiences in France,” says Kahn, reflecting on the release of the film there a year ago.

“You feel that they are more attracted to more specific subjects, or more difficult, more complex [subjects]. And that’s interesting. That’s what I felt.”

Undoubtedly, it doesn’t hurt that the film co-stars Arthur Harari, playing Goldman’s lawyer Georges Kiejman. By coincidence, Harari is the co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall (which won him an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe for the script, shared with Justine Triet), which will further intensify the spotlight on Kahn’s film here. In The Goldman Case, Kiejman endures a tortured relationship with his client, who protests “I’m innocent because I’m innocent” and refuses to allow his defence team to call any character witnesses. He later fires Kiejman, dubbing him “an armchair Jew”. As one critic put it, both are “two children of the Holocaust with diverging destinies, reckoning with their own Jewishness in the wake of one of history’s darkest chapters”.

Harari, sitting alongside Kahn, met Kiejman before the shoot began. “It was a very, very moving and very interesting moment,” he says, “because I could feel what came out of him, his personality, his rhythm. Even if, of course, he was very old, and the case was 50 years ago.” He also studied footage from him back in the late 1960s.

“He was almost my age at the time, so I could see how he would talk and how he would move…and I understood that I could not imitate him. It was not what Cédric was asking.” When I question Kahn, he feels that Goldman’s Jewishness was “crucial” to understanding him as a human being. “He belonged to a generation of Ashkenaz, Jewish [people] in France who had engaged in communism. And communism, in a way, had replaced their relationship to faith or religion. And so he was one of the first who actually stood for his Jewishness, claiming the fact that he was Jewish, and what he was going through had to do with his Jewish identity. And it was also his wound that he was suffering from, and he presented it as a suffering.” As the film shows, Goldman being a Jew repeatedly comes up at the trial, highlighting the prejudice of many of those who gave testimonies (many of which are conflicting).

“Of course, there is the argument that he really used during his trial,” says Kahn. “He said, ‘I’m being accused because I’m Jewish, because all the witnesses are antisemites, and so they’re not judging me as a criminal, but as a Jew.’ And this…we don’t know what’s the level of honesty of this analysis. Was it just strategy, or did he really feel that?” I ask Kahn if the in-baked antisemitism is why the story feels as relevant now as it was then. “I don’t know! Maybe!” he shrugs, clearly unwilling to engage too heavily on the subject.

A scene from the film

For British viewers, simply watching a trial unfold in the French judicial system remains fascinating. “It’s not based on evidence in France,” explains Kahn. “What matters is the conviction of the jurors. So it’s very different. At the same time, it’s very fragile and subjective in the system so it’s a bit dizzy to think about it.” With the judge, prosecutors and defence all speaking to witnesses, it can feel chaotic at times. Is there an increased interest in the freewheeling nature of the French legal system, I wonder?

“What I feel not only in cinema, but even society, there is a special interest for speech and for talking,” Kahn replies. “I mean, it’s also a film about therapies and talk groups, of different topics, of just gathering and talking about subjects. So there is this need of communication and opening up and talking.” What is certain is how the film engages with the question of what constitutes truth. “It’s at the centre of the film and the subject of the trial,” says Kahn. “There’s both truths and lies, just by how you present yourself.”

With the film almost entirely set in the courtroom, there are no flashbacks or re-enactments typical of such films.

“Just remaining in the place and in this time, it’s what blurs even more this idea, because images represent [or misrepresent],” he adds. “If you don’t have images, you just have to focus on the speech.” Khan seems thrilled by not only the outcome of his film, but the process of making it too. “Even the extras…everybody was passionate about the story. Sometimes, as the director, you really feel that you have to carry the others through the shoot. And here I felt carried away. What I remember, really, is the first time that I went in this full room, there were 120 people there, and as I wanted to talk to everyone, I stood where the president [of the court, played in the film by Stéphan Guérin-Tillié] was. For me it was the privileged spot.”

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The Goldman Case opens in cinemas today