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A new film about Adolf Eichmann's trial sees the event through the eyes of Israel

Jake Paltrow’s June Zero offers a new take on the historic legal proceedings, by exploring them through the experiences of three disparate characters — a boy, a prison guard and a Holocaust survivor

October 27, 2022 11:39
1 JuneZero CourtesyOfFilmsBoutique HR
5 min read

Screening as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, Jake Paltrow’s engrossing June Zero is the latest in a line of films and documentaries revolving around the story of Adolf Eichmann.

However, this is not another dramatisation of daring Mossad agents snatching Hitler’s henchman in Argentina and bundling him back to Israel.

Instead, Paltrow takes an intimate approach to events at the end of the trial, as Israelis awaited the outcome of Eichmann’s appeal for clemency, by exploring them through the experiences of three disparate characters — a boy, a prison guard, a Holocaust survivor — based on real people.

“It’s like doing the Lincoln assassination from the point of view of the costumer or the stage hands,” he explains. The way Tom Stoppard made two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet protagonists in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, also comes to mind.

The son of actress Blythe Danner and younger brother of Gwyneth Paltrow, the 47-year-old filmmaker says his interest in the Holocaust began when he was quite young, encouraged by his father, the producer and director Bruce Paltrow, who was born into a Jewish family that emigrated to New York from Europe. He died of cancer in 2002.

“He was quite obsessed by it in certain ways,” says Paltrow. “There were lots of books and conversations. We used to watch The World at War every year, and I think that was the first time I had been exposed to those images and things, and he was explaining it to me.

“I’d like to think I’d be interested in this no matter what my background was. But when you have a parent who’s sort of invested in it, just by exposure I would imagine there’s a certain influence that is strong.”

Paltrow says he related to a moment in the recent TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s alternative history novel The Plot Against America, where a man is asked what it means to be Jewish. “He says, ‘You know, my father was a Jew, and I believe in him.