A Film Unfinished

In 1942, more than two years after Nazi troops herded Poland's Jews into a ghetto in Warsaw, where they were to be held until they were sent to extermination camps, a handful of cameramen were sent in to shoot material that was intended for a German propaganda film. The film was never completed, but after the war, the unedited footage, running roughly an hour, was discovered in a German archive. Acclaimed israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski presents the surviving footage of the Warsaw Ghetto in full for the first time; along with the archival images, featuring interviews with five survivors, as well as a member of the camera crew who offers a perspective on the original intended slant of the film. Hersonski retraces the events, conditions and personnel involved in this cinematic deceit which was made to depict the ghetto as a place of class extremes and socio-economic hypocrisies advanced by the Jews themselves. Acclaimed the world over, "A Film unfinished" is one of the year's most provocative and compelling studies on how history is perceived and fabricated and always worthy of revision. Moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative! - New York Times