Jake Paltrow

Jake Paltrow

Tom Shoval

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Yoav Levi

Tom Hagy

Noam Ovadia

Joy Rieger

Tzahi Grad

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Post Production

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David Silber

Oren Moverman

Miranda Bailey

16 mm

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Hebrew, Arabic, English

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It’s 1962. The man known as the “architect of the Holocaust,” Adolf Eichmann, has been convicted in Jerusalem of crimes against humanity in an emotional public trial. The young state of Israel is about to carry out its first (and, as it turns out, only) execution by hanging. The only problem is what to do with the body after the war criminal is dead? Cremation is agreed upon, followed by disposing of the ashes outside Israeli territorial waters and good riddance!

But Israel has no crematorium. The irony is not lost upon the authorities; Israel must build an oven.

Almost surreal in its acute observation of a very young, vibrant nation forced to confront its recent horrifying past, THE OVEN opens our eyes to the diversity of Jewish identities and to the new forms they take rising out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

Based on a true story, by turns humorous and dramatic, always humanistic, THE OVEN explores the days leading up to Eichmann’s execution through three characters intimately involved in this nation-defining event: a precocious thirteen-year-old factory worker, David, recent Libyan emigre looking to belong, whose hands are small enough to help with the oven building; Eichmann’s main prison guard, Hayim, tasked with protecting the life of this dead man walking; and Chief investigator and holocaust survivor, Micha, on his first trip back to Poland since he was in Auschwitz-Berkinau, where he tries to make sense of the future of the Jewish homeland’s soul post-execution.