Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The French filmmaker Cédric Kahn was a teenager when he first discovered Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France on his parents’ bookshelf. The title of Pierre Goldman’s 1975 autobiography intrigued Kahn, and when he later sat down with it, “I already knew that Goldman was a leftwing revolutionary who had also broken the law,” the 58-year-old director tells me in a video call from Paris. “Then when I read his book I discovered a personality who I thought could make a marvellous subject for a film.” In 1974, Goldman was convicted of four armed robberies in the French capital, one which led to the death of two female pharmacists, and he faced the death penalty. He admitted to having committed three of the robberies but claimed his innocence in the pharmacy affair.Instead of making a by-numbers biopic, Kahn and his co-screenwriter Nathalie Hertzberg decided to focus on Goldman’s 1976 appeals trial. The Goldman Case premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at last year’s Cannes Film Festival before becoming a surprise box office hit in France and earning Arieh Worthalter the best actor prize at this year’s César Awards for his electrifying turn as Goldman. This is the latest in a series of recent award-winning French courtroom dramas — Saint Omer (2022) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — that use a trial to expose deep faultlines within French society. “I think as soon as you examine a justice system it very quickly becomes political,” Kahn says. “We discover underlying currents regarding race, ethnicity and social injustice. I think it’s undeniable that when you depict a trial you are also putting society on trial.” As the son of leftwing intellectuals, Kahn grew up hearing stories about the student revolts that rocked France in 1968. His childhood spent living in a hippie commune in the Drôme, south-eastern France, left him with “an abiding interest in marginal characters”.The director, who began working as an assistant editor for Maurice Pialat at 21, came to prominence with Roberto Succo (2001), another story of a real-life criminal. The film proved controversial and was the object of several protests by French police, who objected to its clinical depiction of a cold-blooded cop killer. Kahn’s interest in criminal behaviour also found an outlet in his masterly Georges Simenon adaptation Red Lights (2004), in which an escaped convict plays a major part in the narrative. “I think we are all attracted by this kind of transgressive behaviour because there is something about it that we can’t grasp,” Kahn says. “From the point of view of cinema, it’s very interesting because films allow us to get up close and intimate with these types of characters. For me there is as much attraction as there is repulsion in these types of stories.”When Kahn began to oversee the editing of The Goldman Case with his longtime collaborator Yann Dedet he aimed to emphasise the duelling voices in the trial. “I felt that the images and the edits should be at the service of what was said,” he explains. “That actually doesn’t happen all that often, because the visual language of cinema usually takes priority. I actually did a lot of the editing with my eyes shut by listening to what was being said and then telling Yann to move on to the next shot.”At the core of The Goldman Case is the fractious relationship between Goldman and his defence lawyer Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari). Both were the sons of Polish Jews who came to France to escape the pogroms in their homeland. “Kiejman’s ambition transformed his story into something powerful,” Kahn says. “Whereas Goldman felt like a ‘cursed Jew’. He couldn’t climb out of his own tragedy — his life reads like a tragic novel.”Goldman’s feelings towards Kiejman are exacerbated by their being at odds over the best way to mount a defence. “Goldman pleaded innocence and Kiejman pleaded the benefit of the doubt, which is not at all the same thing,” Kahn says. “It is at the root of their conflict that Kiejman never pleaded for Goldman’s innocence. Above all, I think that Goldman wanted to be the hero of his own trial. He couldn’t stand the idea that a lawyer could take more of the limelight than him.”Kahn remains evasive when I ask him whether he believes Goldman was guilty of killing the two pharmacists or not. But he draws attention to Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, which became a literary sensation in France when it was published a year before the appeals trial, and notes that Goldman convincingly defended himself point by point, witness by witness. Kahn also likens Goldman’s trial, which garnered him the support of members of the French intelligentsia, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to the OJ Simpson trial in 1995. “Simpson very quickly turned attention away from the murder of his wife by casting himself as the victim of institutional racism,” Kahn says. “Goldman’s strategy, which Kiejman disagreed with, was quite similar in that respect.”Kahn’s film shows how Goldman turned his trial into a cause célèbre redolent of Émile Zola’s famous pamphlet J’accuse (1898) by denouncing the French police as inherently racist and antisemitic. Several of Goldman’s black friends were initially accused of the crimes he did or did not commit, and Goldman points the finger at the way that they were forced into making confessions against their will.“Even now when I bump into people, I ask them why they were so sure at the time of Goldman’s innocence,” Kahn says. “It can upset them now a bit, but they say that they didn’t want to have any doubt because he was a powerful symbol. People weren’t interested in facts; they were interested in what he had to say. What’s so impressive with Goldman is that he managed to impose a discourse.”And he sees this discourse resonating just as much in today’s polarised France. “What’s crazy is that for years left-of-centre and right-of-centre parties dominated the French political scene,” he says. “It’s a hazard of circumstances that this film arrives at a time when there is massive political tension in France between the far left and the far right. It’s quite astonishing to see French society operating cyclically.”‘The Goldman Case’ is in UK cinemas from September 20Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
