Average Rating: 8.5/10
Reviews Counted: 60
Fresh: 58 | Rotten: 2
A heartbreaking, haunting historical document, A Film Unfinished excavates particularly horrible chapter of Holocaust history, and in doing so, the film provides a glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine.
Average Rating: 9.3/10
Critic Reviews: 18
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 0
A heartbreaking, haunting historical document, A Film Unfinished excavates particularly horrible chapter of Holocaust history, and in doing so, the film provides a glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine.
liked it
Average Rating: 4/5
User Ratings: 830
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
Unrated, 1 hr. 29 min.
Documentary, Television, Art House & International, Special Interest
Aug 18, 2010 Limited
Jan 1, 2011
$0.3M
Oscilloscope Pictures
All Critics (60) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (59) | Rotten (2) | DVD (3)
An electrifying essay on film's ability to falsify history.
Filmmaker Yael Hersonski reshapes the impossibly vile and tragic source material into a devastating record of Nazi criminality.
Yael Hersonski's documentary is infuriating, heartbreaking, devastating -- and scary. It depicts a lie upon a lie.
A remarkable new documentary that reminds us of film's inherent capacity for lying.
A Film Unfinished is a profoundly unnerving historical document.
What we are left with is perhaps one of the most disturbing 60 minutes of raw footage ever put together.
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
A heartbreaking but engrossing detective story that not only shines a light on Nazi evil but on the manipulative prowess of the Third Reich.
The more it strips itself to the evidence... the more devastating and affecting the portrait becomes.
...a very powerful documentary and first feature by Yael Hersonski.
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.
A Film Unfinished is a sort of ghost story. It's guaranteed to haunt you.
Examination of Nazi inhumanity by an Israeli director on record as opposing Zionist inhumanity.
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.
...the real star of A Film Unfinished is the footage shot by [Nazi cameraman Willy] Wist, which remains horrifying to this day.
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.
A Film Unfinished reminds you that the nightmare of the Holocaust knows no limits.
A flawed but hard-to-shake doc of one of mankind's greatest acts of inhumanity
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
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