Nathan-ism

Director Elan Golod expected to attend

Nathan Hilu was just an 18-year-old Jewish US Army private out of New York’s Lower East Side when he was tasked with guarding high-level German war criminals including Hermann Goering, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher after their sentencing at Nuremberg. In conversation with all of the prisoners, he finds himself most often in dialogue with Speer, who kept detailed journals of his wartime experience. This encourages Hilu to make note of the details for his own memoirs and he will obsessively document these seminal experiences, returning to them throughout the course of his lifetime. These details figure most prominently in Nathan’s near century-long artistic practice. Referred to by one journalist as “the most significant Jewish outsider artist you’ve never heard of,” Hilu’s idiosyncratic style springs in streams of consciousness: childlike collages created with crayons, pencils and glue emblazoned with Sharpie-scrawled words in English and Yiddish and pastel splashes of color. With his Jewish heritage at the forefront of his work, Hilu vividly illustrates his autobiography capturing over nine decades spent as an artist in New York. Nathan-ism is a gentle portrait of one artist’s unique perspective on a world gone by and his fervent desire for self-expression.

The San Francisco screening of Nathan-ism at the Vogue Theater is offered as free JFI Mitzvah Series program.

United States Premiere