A Film Unfinished (2010)
Director: Yael Hersonski | Country: Israel | Runtime: 89 min
Synopsis
In 1942, a Nazi film crew entered the Warsaw Ghetto and spent weeks shooting footage of its Jewish inhabitants. The resulting film — raw, unedited, unfinished — was discovered in a German archive after the war. For decades, historians used this footage as documentary evidence of life in the ghetto, unaware that much of it was staged by the Nazis to create propaganda.
A Film Unfinished is director Yael Hersonski’s methodical, devastating investigation of this footage. She weaves together the original film reels, recently discovered rushes that reveal the staging, a Nazi cinematographer’s prison diary, and the testimony of elderly Warsaw Ghetto survivors who are shown the footage for the first time on screen.
The result is a film about films — about how images lie, how propaganda works, and how the Holocaust continues to haunt us through the documents it left behind.
Awards & Festival Selections
- Sundance Film Festival — World Premiere
- Hot Docs — Special Presentation
- IDFA — Official Selection
- Jerusalem Film Festival — Best Documentary Award
- Cannes Film Festival — Special Screening, Critics’ Week
- Academy Awards — Shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature
Press
“A profound and disturbing meditation on images, truth, and the ethics of looking. One of the great documentary films about the Holocaust.”
— Variety
“One of the most important documentary films to emerge from Israel.”
— Jewish Journal