returns to Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival with “June Zero,” his first foreign-language production. In the film – picked up for sales by ICM Partners and Films Boutique – he takes a closer look at the trial and execution of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, hanged in Israel in 1962.
“In our movie, Eichmann functions like the oil well in ‘The Wages of Fear.’ He is a circumstance, like the weather. Something to anticipate and to react to.” “We don’t open with a card announcing ‘based on a true story,’ as I suppose we could. [But] we are stringing the story along a series of public facts: the verdict, the timeline of the appeal, that an oven was built for his body. What interested me initially was this detail of how they disposed of it, in a country and culture with no cremation.”
“We don’t have an answer to what are the differences between commemoration and perpetuation when it comes to traumas of this nature. And how we teach our children about them,” adds Paltrow. “It’s not a relic that exists like an anecdote from the past. You can think about future trials, what they mean and how they are conducted, what is punishment and how does it really define a country,” he observes. Noting that the fact that it was partly shot in Ukraine, standing in for Poland, also brought a new resonance to the story.