A heartbreaking, haunting historical document, A Film Unfinished excavates particularly horrible chapter of Holocaust history, and in doing so, the film provides a glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine.
A heartbreaking, haunting historical document, A Film Unfinished excavates particularly horrible chapter of Holocaust history, and in doing so, the film provides a glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine.
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, Film Forum is proud to present Yael Hersonski's A FILM UNFINISHED, having its U.S. theatrical premiere on Wednesday, August 18. Since the end of WWII, one copy of a 60-minute (unfinished) propaganda film, shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942 (a
year prior to the uprising), labeled simply "Ghetto," sat undisturbed in an East German archive. A FILM UNFINISHED presents the entire film, both documentary and fictionalized sequences (e.g. dozens of Jewish patrons at an elegant restaurant; a luxurious funeral cortege). It includes a revealing interview with Willy Wist, the only cinematographer identified with the production (himself caught onscreen in his SS uniform), as well as scenes in which now-elderly former residents of the Warsaw Ghetto, reviewing the footage, occasionally recognize their neighbors, or report upon the filmmakers' efforts to stage fantasies of affluence and well-being, or of Jews treating their less fortunate compatriots with callous disdain. This is a film of enormous import: it documents conditions under which ghetto residents lived and the efforts (however imperfect) of the perpetrators to recast this reality to suggest an entirely different scenario. A FILM UNFINISHED is presented with support from the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Film. -- (C) Film Forum
Painful, eye-opening, and extraordinarily necessary to view, especially by the young to whom the Holocaust is nowadays too abstract a notion to fully mentally envision in all of its grotesqueness
Hersonski brings something both old and new to the table with this powerful 89-minute documentary. Other strengths are the well-written narration read by Rona Keenan and the haunting original music of composer Yishai Adar.
It's impossible to watch A Film Unfinished and not feel haunted by the restless ghosts of history and those who tried -- and failed -- to use film to tell a lie.
...analysis, clarification and a counterbalancing - if not outright refutation - of the persistent, nasty myth of Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust.
Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished reclaims history, teaches a lesson about the reliability of images and raises unanswerable questions about complicity.
Moviegoers have witnessed dozens of depictions of these events over the years, but here we can see what it's like to view them with the eyes of real experience.
A searing expose of the brutality of the Nazi regime ironically made by the perpetrators themselves, and a subtle examination of the process and purpose that lay behind it.
The title also refers to Hersonski's own picture, part of a continuing saga that will never be finished as long as there are more Holocaust stories to expose.
An insightful cache of informative but sickening images shot within the confines of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto during the holocaust. Includes scenes staged by Hitler's propaganda machine as well as raw, unedited footage of Nazi crimes against humanity.
July 18, 2010
Randy Tippy
Super Reviewer
The most depressing documentary that everyone should watch.
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