By Peter Keough

Memory – elusive and essential, tormenting and inescapable — serves as a theme for several of the documentaries in this year’s BJFF.

Boston Jewish Film Festival (through November 17 in theaters; November 18–20 online)

A scene from Nathan-ism. Photo: Boston MFA

For many veterans, the time they spent in the military was the most memorable of their lives. This is especially true for Nathan Hilu, subject of Elan Golod’s subtle, nuanced, and affecting Nathan-ism (2023; screens November 10 at 11:30 a.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, followed by a conversation with the director; available virtually). The son of Syrian Jewish immigrants, Hilu at 19 was an Army PFC assigned to guard some of the highest ranking Nazi prisoners during the 1945 Nuremberg trial. “Believe it or not I, Nathan Hilu, a Jew, took Herman Göring to the Christmas services,” he recalls. “I told him, ‘I, PFC Nathan Hilu, a Jew, am now in charge.”

As he recalls this incident, the now nonagenarian draws it in a sketchbook, a Proustian compulsion that has driven him for some seven decades. He has filled numerous volumes with sketches of his memories of this brief period in his life and of the history that led up to it. He was inspired, he says, by his “friend” Albert Speer (“a very nice man”), the sly and seductive Nazi henchman who charmed his way out of a death penalty and who was, at the time, writing his own memoirs in his cell.

A prime example of outsider art, Hilu’s work resembles a sometimes amateurish, sometimes visionary graphic novel, overflowing and crammed with crude images and text, often childlike, occasionally aspiring to the artistry of Art Spiegelman, Marc Chagall, or Charlotte Salomon.

“For years I’ve been writing my memoirs,” explains Hilu. “Whatever comes out I just draw. In art there are all kinds of isms. Futurism. Impressionism. Cubism. This is Nathan-ism.”

By doing justice to this one-man school of art Golod also achieves an understated artistry. At a time when so many documentarians employ animation gratuitously, he does so with shrewdness and insight, paralleling images of Hilu’s work with his recollections. In one sequence an animated version of Hilu’s drawing of Speer writing his memoirs is intercut with Hilu himself drawing that picture. A variation, perhaps, of M.C. Escher’s lithograph Drawing Hands.

Golod also employs various experts — archivists, art journalists, historians, and a State Department official — to not only analyze the art but validate its factual authenticity. It holds up well except for one crucial detail. By questioning that, Golod seems to pose an existential challenge that might shatter Hilu himself. The art, the memories, and the life have become one, indomitable and fragile.

A scene from Pepi Fandango. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Peter (aka Pepi) Perez in Lucija Stojevic’s nuanced and moving Pepi Fandango (2023; screens November 11 at the Center for the Arts in Natick preceded by a guitar performance from Francesco Barone and an introduction by the director and Perez) faces a challenge that is the somewhat the inverse of Hilu’s in Nathan-ism. He wants to use art to summon his memories — but is unable to do so.

As a five-year-old he and his Viennese family fled to France to escape the Nazi takeover of Austria. The French government imprisoned them with other Jewish and political refugees in the Rivesaltes concentration camp, where he was separated from his parents. Alone, he would listen as the Spanish Romani children, also alone, sang flamenco fandango songs to communicate with their parents elsewhere in the camp.

Now, 80 years later, he wants to compose a fandango that he hopes will make sense of this experience. To do so, he and his old friend, Alfred, a fellow Viennese and an accomplished musician, decide to travel across Europe. Their destination is Paterna de Rivera in Andalusia, the inspirational birthplace of the “peteneras” style that Perez first heard in the camp, inspiring a lifelong love.

The film takes the form of a road movie with the two old friends chatting, joking, and reminiscing while they travel by car and train or stop at inns and restaurants. As they approach their destination the enormities of the past, underscored by archival footage and the unobtrusive flamenco soundtrack, encroach on Perez’s determination.

When they arrive they meet old musician friends who have become discouraged and have given up the profession. They wander listlessly through streets filled with happy children recalling those imprisoned in Rivesaltes while passing ranks of cages of songbirds for sale. At last Perez realizes that he must return to the camp itself to set his memories to rest. And perhaps then he can write a song about them.

A scene from Children of Peace. Photo: Haward Shippin

In Children of Peace (2022; screens November 17 at 2:30 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts followed by a Q & A with the director. Also available online November 18-20) the filmmaker Maayan Schwartz, like Perez, returns to the place where he spent his childhood, the source of his most intense memories. Unlike Perez, though, those memories are idyllic.

He grew up in Neve Shalom (“Oasis of Peace”), a village founded in the ’70s by visionaries as a model for the harmonious coexistence between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Like other such utopian communities it was beset by difficulties within and without — the latter being especially daunting, given the many regional conflicts that have broken out in the five decades of the village’s existence. Yet Schwartz, like most of the children raised there, both Jewish and Arab, recall it as a positive, enlightening, and affirming experience, ending all too abruptly when they had to leave it as adults.

But will that idealized memory hold up when he revisits? A crucial turning point for young people in the village occurs when they reach draft age. Arab citizens are exempt, but Jews like Schwartz are obliged to serve. When they do so, it imposes a breach with Arab friends that is hard to overcome. Moreover, the experience of the harsh realities in the outside world makes them wonder if the village they recall is illusory, a bubble in a hostile universe.

Such are the concerns Schwartz ponders as he recounts the community’s history and meets up with old friends, Arab and Jewish, to share their memories and their thoughts on these issues. Perhaps mollified by the presence of the camera, or the bonding power of shared experience, these friendships, in some cases a bit tense, seem restored.

Meanwhile, the world outside goes on. An outbreak of violence between Arabs and Jews threatens to spill into civil war (perhaps these are the clashes that are the focus of Hilla Medalia’s powerful 2023 documentary Mourning in Lod), and Schwartz packs up his family and moves back to the safety, however tentative, of his old hometown. Even now, as this New Yorker article from earlier this year indicates, the village endures. Though for how long — now that the future of Israel and the Middle East in general looks chaotic and bleak — remains to be seen.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).