This year’s festival offers a double feature of documentaries about the treatment of Jewish artists under the Nazis. 

In “As Seen Through These Eyes,” Maya Angelou narrates an exploration of the way various artists, particularly painters, used their art to fight back against Hitler and to record Nazi atrocities and life in concentration camps such as Theresienstadt/Terezin.

And the art works featured in this film are stunning – moving, touching, terrifying, angry or even beautiful images of people and life in the camps. Especially powerful are those works in the symbolic style of German Expressionism. As a whole, the film serves as a striking reminder of the power of a single image to tell a story.

That Hitler was a would-be artist whose ambitions were thwarted by his limited talent made his attacks on artists and art, which started early, all the more ironic.

Along with fabulous images of art, the documentary includes interviews with survivors speaking about their experiences under the Nazis and about the work of artists who did not survive, along with archival footage.

While painters are the major focus of the first of this double bill, the next documentary, “Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me,” looks at Nazi treatment of a beloved German composer and his descendants. Although Felix Mendelssohn was born Jewish, his father converted his musical prodigy son to Christianity when Felix was 7.

Ironically, Mendelssohn’s intermarried, Christian descendents were unaware of their Jewish heritage until Hitler’s rise to power. This very polished and compelling film, filled with Mendelssohn’s lush music, was made by one of those descendants. She chronicles both the fate of her great-great-great-grand uncle’s music under Hitler and her family’s efforts to evade the Nazis ever-tightening laws on people of mixed heritage, which defined some of them racial as Jewish and others not.

Mendelssohn’s famous wedding march from “A Mid Summer’s Night’s Dream” had been played at every German wedding until the Nazis redefined Mendelssohn as Jewish and banned his music. Shortly after his death, Mendelssohn had been the subject of an anti-Semitic treatise written by his near-contemporary Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer.

The documentary uses interviews, archival film footage, family stills and portraits and musical excerpts to tell the story of Mendelssohn’s life, music and his family’s life under Hitler. Musical experts discuss the composer and his music, with plenty of samples, while the filmmaker interviews her father and cousin who describe the family’s experiences. It all comes together to form one fascinating film.

Documentary double feature

What: “As Seen Through These Eyes” and “Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me”

When: 2 p.m. June 17

More info: Betsy Zimbalist, docent at the St. Louis Art Museum, introduces “As Seen Through These Eyes” and Warren Goldberg, member of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, introduces “Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me.”a