Nathan-ism (2024) Film Review
Elan Golod‘s fierce documentary Nathan-ism starts like an uplifting story about an artist, and then it becomes something else altogether. There’s an old man called Nathan Hilu. He lives in New York City, and he’s more than 90 years old. The war veteran spends his days drawing art, but in his complicated paintings, he includes a piece of history. A history he pulls from his memories of being a guard during the Nuremberg Trials. He stared at horror in the face. The impact of a sinister smile by the Devil, who awaited death.
Nathan’s stories are incredible. With a lot of detail, he describes witnessing the kiss of death, when Hermann Göring obtained a potassium cyanide capsule and was able to commit suicide before being punished for his crimes. He also describes his own personal conflicts when on suicide watch. He was the son of Syrian Jewish immigrants, and he was aware of the horrors of concentration camps. Why wouldn’t he want them to die a horrible death? It seems Hilu’s only able to answer through his paintings.
But there’s a catch, and the documentary does a fantastic job at portraying a situation that is absurd, but some deemed necessary. As it turns out, it was impossible to figure out a way to know if Nathan was telling the truth. The documents had been destroyed, and his testimonies seemed to be the only thing producers had in order to confirm if what he was saying was true. This is best evidenced in a sequence when Nathan confronts the director, as he believes no one believes what he says.
Then again, Nathan needed to be heard. He was one of those guys who left messages, asking to be called back and adding a desperate “please” before the beep. His paintings are extremely interesting as journals of horror and history lessons, but he wanted more. Fortunately, the visionary director behind the project of Nathan-ism makes sure of this. By the end, we are left with questions that call for no answers and some heartbreaking answers to questions we didn’t know could exist.
Nathan now rests in peace, and this documentary feature is perhaps the best representation of his legacy. But it’s also a great piece about loneliness, solitude, and the isolation some people are forced to live in. No one understood being there during the Nuremberg Trials like Nathan did, and whenever he spoke out loud, skepticism was lurking in order to ask the wrong questions. As important as historical accuracy may be, can’t art be interpreted as a personal version of facts? It’s not a fact of the adulteration of history. It’s about the loudness of a statement by a man who decided to speak up about the time when he saw the human side of monsters and expressed himself about it.
In times where hate seems to be disguised as intolerance and justice, a film like Nathan-ism is worth checking out.
