June Zero

Making history is something many of us dream of, but the circumstances of memorable acts are often tragic or escape people's recollection in their true form. Jake Paltrow's historical film focuses on a person who needs no introduction: Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the final solution to the Jewish question, who breathed his last in 1962 in an Israeli cell after a court had sentenced him to death for crimes against humanity. June Zero tells the story from the point of view of the people who, from the perspective of history as interpreted in the textbooks, played a much more subtle role. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of a young boy who, at his father's instigation, works in a lathe factory and participates in the production of Eichmann's cremation furnaces, a captain of the prison guard, and an Auschwitz survivor. Their intertwining lines paint the Eichmann trial as a definitive reminder of the Holocaust that continues to plague the hearts of Jewish people long after the end of the war. Although the script sometimes strays into descriptions that are meant to bring the subject matter closer to a global audience and ends up being unnecessarily literal, its point about the transience and at the same time the fundamentality of some historical acts is beautifully and floridly declaimed. "We must never forget" remains the slogan that best encapsulates the emotional Schindler's List, but June Zero is an engaging, more intimate alternative in which the nature of the memories, not just the acts themselves, is crucial. Evil and good never end and are not limited by dates, but by those who do them. 70 % (18/07/2022)