Critic Reviews
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Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
An electrifying essay on film's ability to falsify history.
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Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader
Filmmaker Yael Hersonski reshapes the impossibly vile and tragic source material into a devastating record of Nazi criminality.
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Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic
Yael Hersonski's documentary is infuriating, heartbreaking, devastating -- and scary. It depicts a lie upon a lie.
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Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News
A remarkable new documentary that reminds us of film's inherent capacity for lying.
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Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
A Film Unfinished reminds you that the nightmare of the Holocaust knows no limits.
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Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times
Discovered after the war, the film contains horrific images of starvation, poverty and humiliation, interspersed with surreal scenes of well-dressed Jews enjoying a restaurant dinner or an urban stroll.
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Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.Com
Riveting, scary, and significant, Film Unfinished contrasts invaluable footage of agit-prop Nazi feature with the reaction of Warsaw Gehtto survivors to that footage and testimonies of the real life thee.
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Brandon Judell, GreenCine
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
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Mike Scott, Times-Picayune
A heartbreaking but engrossing detective story that not only shines a light on Nazi evil but on the manipulative prowess of the Third Reich.
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Sean Axmaker, Parallax View
The more it strips itself to the evidence... the more devastating and affecting the portrait becomes.
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Elias Savada, Film Threat
...a very powerful documentary and first feature by Yael Hersonski.
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Keith Cohen, Entertainment Spectrum
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.
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Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star
A Film Unfinished is a sort of ghost story. It's guaranteed to haunt you.
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Louis Proyect, rec.arts.movies.reviews
Examination of Nazi inhumanity by an Israeli director on record as opposing Zionist inhumanity.
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Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle
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.
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Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
...analysis, clarification and a counterbalancing - if not outright refutation - of the persistent, nasty myth of Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust.
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Sarah Boslaugh, Playback:stl
...the real star of A Film Unfinished is the footage shot by [Nazi cameraman Willy] Wist, which remains horrifying to this day.
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Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished reclaims history, teaches a lesson about the reliability of images and raises unanswerable questions about complicity.
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Josh Bell, Las Vegas Weekly
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.
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Frank Swietek, One Guy's Opinion
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.
Read all 21 critic reviews
Featured Audience Ratings
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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.
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The most depressing documentary that everyone should watch.
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I'm not sure which was harder to watch...this film, or the extra feature "Death Mills". "Death Mills" is an actual short film directed by Billy Wilder for the U.S. War Dept in 1945. The short film was originally intended for screening in occupied Germany and… More
I'm not sure which was harder to watch...this film, or the extra feature "Death Mills". "Death Mills" is an actual short film directed by Billy Wilder for the U.S. War Dept in 1945. The short film was originally intended for screening in occupied Germany and Austria to show the people in those countries what horrors they supported. It was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated the camps: the survivors, the conditions, and the evidence of mass murder. This was eventually shown in the U.S., but was rarely done so. This short film alone made this a memorable watch.
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There have been many incomplete films relegated to the dutsbins of oblivion. What separates the subject of "A Film Unfinished" is not its simple title of "The Ghetto" but its subject matter, that of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, shortly before its liquidation,… More
There have been many incomplete films relegated to the dutsbins of oblivion. What separates the subject of "A Film Unfinished" is not its simple title of "The Ghetto" but its subject matter, that of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, shortly before its liquidation, containing about an hour's worth of footage(some shot in color) commissioned by the Nazis that was forgotten for decades in East German archives.
For me watching the footage is like watching ghosts while providing insight into the horrible conditions inside the ghetto. It is very emotional for survivors to watch it, looking for people they once knew amongst the footage, some of it staged to give the appearance of affluence. As one survivor puts it, they did not have flowers and if they did, they would have eaten them.
So what was the purpose of the footage shot? We know it was propaganda, of course, but without any narration or soundtrack, it is hard to know for sure what the point was since that could change the meaning of what we see, even with the testimony of one of the cameramen.(A neat little trick I learned from Screen Studies 101.) And it is also hard to say what footage was intended for a completed film.(Like a lot of filmmakers, the Nazis used multiple takes.) Some survivors thought the film was made to give a negative portrait of the ghetto while I think the Nazis were intending to give the indication of a thriving and vibrant community to cover up any claims of the awful deed they were about to commit since they were not exactly open about the slaughters they committed.
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Some films transcend filmmaking or entertainment and just ARE important and valuable and necessary. This is one of those rare and true finds. Literally. Discovered in a vault in East Germany after WWII were reels of silent footage filmed by Third Reich cameramen in the Warsaw… More
Some films transcend filmmaking or entertainment and just ARE important and valuable and necessary. This is one of those rare and true finds. Literally. Discovered in a vault in East Germany after WWII were reels of silent footage filmed by Third Reich cameramen in the Warsaw Ghetto. Interspersed amongst the images of the massive amount of suffering are staged "scenes" of Jews in more luxurious settings (parties, lavish dinners, etc.). Wealthy-appearing Jews were also forced to walk carelessly by those who were starving or dead in the streets, to demonstrate how callously the Jews behaved. Holocaust survivors are shown this footage, and it is their reactions that prove to be the most haunting images in this film. A modern-day interview with one of the cameramen from that time adds yet another layer to what could have been a very dry documentary. While not the most rigorous of docs on this subject (it could have used a little more background exposition), it resonates greatly, especially today, where so-called "Reality" shows are more carefully written and staged than most fictional narratives. The lines between truth and fiction are so blurred these days, this vital filmgoing experience is a jolt of the reality we NEED to see.
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