Nathan-ism With Elan Golod

At the end of World War II, Nathan Hilu, the son of Jewish immigrants to New York, received a life-changing assignment from the U.S. Army: to guard the top Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. This experience fueled a lifetime of artistic inspiration for Nathan, a virtually unknown “outsider artist”, who spent the next 70 years obsessively creating a visual narrative from his memories. But what happens when those memories take on a life of their own?

The film Nathan-ism (USA, 2023) by Elan Golod explores Nathan's relationship with his own stories, and the compulsion he has to share them with a world that doesn't always listen.

Filmmaker Elan Golod proposes a documentary portrait of the aging artist but what begins as a peek at a unique witness to history grows into an absorbing study of the function of art as archive and invention. Daring to question an artist’s stories, Nathan-ism is a fascinating look at one man’s need to share truths with a world that doesn’t always want to listen.