The Goldman Case

Cédric Kahn opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2023 with a courtroom film that stays in the courtroom. It went on to eight César nominations and won Best Actor for Arieh Worthalter, who had been a supporting presence in French cinema for a decade and is not off screen here for more than a few minutes.

Pierre Goldman was a real figure: a militant of the far left, half-brother of the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, son of Polish Jewish partisans, sentenced to life in 1974 for a pharmacy robbery in which two women were shot. He always admitted three other hold-ups and always denied the murders. His memoir made him a cause for the French intelligentsia, and in 1976 he was granted a retrial. Kahn films it almost entirely from the public gallery's vantage — no flashbacks, no reconstruction, no score — with Arthur Harari as Georges Kiejman, the lawyer trying to defend a client who keeps sabotaging him on principle.

The result works as a procedural and as an argument about what a trial actually adjudicates: police racism, the credibility of witnesses, the political usefulness of a defendant. French critics compared it to Twelve Angry Men and to Kahn's own earlier work, and it arrived in a year when French cinema was unusually interested in courtrooms. It is the least stylised of them, and the most uncomfortable.