Abraham Bursztein, an 88 year-old Jewish tailor, runs away from Buenos Aires to Poland, where he proposes to find a friend who saved him from a certain death at the end of World War II. After seven decades without any contact with him, Abraham will try to find his old friend and keep his promise to return one day. Comedic and poignant in equal measure, The Last Suit approaches its weighty themes with a light touch that illuminates a serious story.

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Yael Hersonski’s powerful documentary achieves a remarkable feat through its penetrating look at another film: the now-infamous Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. Discovered after the war, the unfinished work—with no soundtrack—quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. The later discovery of a long-missing reel complicated earlier readings, showing the manipulations of camera crews in these “everyday” scenes. Well-heeled Jews attending elegant dinners and theatricals (while callously stepping over the dead bodies of compatriots) now appeared as unwilling, but complicit, actors, alternately fearful and in denial of their looming fate.

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Slight and stoop-shouldered, filled with intellectual curiosity but prone to mischief, Petr Ginz read voraciously, wrote constantly, developed cryptographs to record BBC broadcasts, built exploding toy cannons to frighten his classmates, and drew and painted a world full of adventure and exotic locations. In his novel, an allegory about Hitler, Petr wrote and illustrated the story of a giant robotic creature that is used by the government to terrorize the people. He ends the book with the warning: “Is it not possible that a new monster may appear on the surface of this earth, worse than this one–a monster that…will torture mankind in a terrible manner.”

Through Petr’s artwork, novels, short stories and magazine articles, interwoven with fantastical animation, this unconventional documentary portrait reveals his journey from precocious child to young adult, from innocence to the painful awareness of inhumanity, from gifted artist and writer to prodigy. Although Petr’s life ended at Auschwitz, it is not a story of tragedy but a celebration—a testament to how a boy’s wonder and creative expression represent the best of what makes us human.

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