To Israelis, it was the War of Independence. To Palestinians, it was the Nakba — the catastrophe. “Tantura,” from Israeli documentarian Alon Schwarz, begins with audio from the 1948 U.N. Declaration that led to the founding of Israel and the subsequent clearing of Arab populations from the region. While it aims to contextualize self-perpetuated myths of national glory, it focuses more specifically on the tiny Palestinian fishing village of Tantura, the site of an alleged massacre by the Idf, and one Israeli researcher’s squashed attempts to expose that history 50 — now almost 75 — years later.

Though it features brief moments of confrontation with elderly Israeli subjects — some of them soldiers who were present at the time — for its first hour. However, in the final stretch of its 85-minute runtime, this approach proves foundational for chilling revelations and quiet, cinematically self-evident questions about the way we remember history.

If “Tantura” is about one person,...