Jake Paltrow has been spending the Independence Day holiday weekend in the Czech Republic for the world premiere of his Adolf Eichmann drama June Zero, which had a special screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.The Hebrew-language feature unfolds in the lead-up to the Nazi war criminal’s hanging in Israel in May 1962, as debate raged in the country over whether his death sentence should be upheld.
At the end of this story you can watch an exclusive first-look clip from the film.June Zero is the New York-based director’s fourth feature after the documentary De Palma and fiction works Young Ones and The Good Night.Paltrow (brother of Oscar winner Gwyneth) started digging into the events surrounding this key moment in Israeli history after coming across a detail on how the authorities secretly ordered the construction of a portable cremation oven to incinerate Eichmann’s body immediately after his execution“I thought that this could be a good movie, but I was working off a very small detail,” recounts Paltrow.He travelled to Israel on a research trip in 2018 to track down and conduct filmed interviews with people connected to the building of the oven, with a vague idea of using the footage in a film.This morphed into a fictionalised tale drawing on these accounts, with the drama now revolving around the intertwined stories of Eichmann’s main prison guard, a Holocaust survivor who assisted in the war criminal’s capture and trial, and a young Jewish boy, newly arrived in Israel from Libya, working at a factory clandestinely building the oven.Another turning point was bringing on board Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval as a co-writer.“There were historical and cultural layers I didn’t think I could penetrate.
Read more on deadline.com