Le Procès Goldman (2023)

Pierre Goldman, the character in the film, is played by Arieh Worthalter. The second trial of Pierre Goldman takes place in [year not specified]. He has been in prison for six years and is suspected of killing two female pharmacists during an armed robbery in [year not specified]. Although he admitted to three minor robberies upon his arrest, committed shortly before and after Christmas 1969, he proclaims his innocence in the double murder committed around the same time. During the murder, a courageous young police officer tried, in the night, to stop the fleeing culprit. After publishing a book in which he denounces a series of errors in the investigation that affected the first trial, he obtains the annulment of the trial by the Court of Cassation and a new trial before the assize court. Several passages from the book are also read during the second trial. Goldman refuses to call character witnesses, which he says would be at odds with the forgiveness he is asking for the Christmas 1969 robberies, first and foremost from his father and stepmother. He is also determined to prove himself worthy of the memory of the Holocaust passed on to him by his biological mother, who was expelled after the war on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union, and whom he would join in Poland during the summers. His father, Alter Mojsze Goldman, a former hero of the Polish Jewish resistance and a communist from the earliest days, as well as his partner and future wife Christiane Succab-Goldman and the group of Antilleans he was with on the evening of the double murder, are questioned by leading barrister Henri-René Garaud, a right-wing figure, who repeatedly clashes with Georges Kiejman, a left-wing figure defending Goldman. Each side tries to manage as best it can the many supporters of both camps in the courtroom, illustrating [something] at work in the 1970s. Convinced that he is the victim of bourgeois justice and a racist police force, the accused is combative and sometimes unsettles his new lawyers, particularly the young Georges Kiejman, who is making his criminal-law debut and whom his client offends—but does not discourage—by calling him [insult omitted] in a letter to another of his lawyers. Henri-René Garaud, for his part, mocks, for example, the mobilization of politicized intellectuals on the eve of the second trial and demands, sometimes with the presiding judge's support, a balance in speaking time. On several occasions, he also makes sure that the noisy presence of supporters does not affect the prosecution witnesses. Joël Lautric, one of Goldman's Antillean friends, admits to having changed his testimony several times during the investigation. He ultimately supports the defense and humbly asks the accused for forgiveness. Georges Kiejman, for his part, seems unsure what approach to take in his closing argument, but catalogues the contradictions in the prosecution witnesses' testimony.