A Film Unfinished

In 1942, a Nazi film crew went into the Warsaw ghetto, where thousands of Jews were imprisoned, starving and awaiting deportation to Treblinka, to make a documentary. Their point was to create a propaganda piece, to justify their anti-Semitic policies, and to make the Jews who lived there seem strange, alien and evil. The document they produced, but didn't finish, wound up in museum exhibits about the Holocaust, but its layers of reality and fiction were never fully understood. In A Film Unfinished, director Yael Hersonski shows the film to survivors and to one of the cameramen who worked on it, and uncovers a missing “outtakes” reel that shows multiple takes of seemingly documentary scenes. It's a strange and enlightening look at the way pseudo-realities are constructed, and how film can both document oppression and be used as a part of that oppression.